Missed my post last Thursday because my computer died, and the new one would not open my blogger posting site. Problem finally solved, and I suspect nobody wants to hear about someone else’s computer struggles. Anyway – here’s my post:
At breakfast Kim and I sometimes share our dreams, if we can remember them. Here’s one from a few years ago:
The Flying Dream
At breakfast you tell me your dream:
You are swimming in the ocean.
It is warm and calm. You move
effortlessly, like a ray.
the way I fly in my dreams
Soft water glides along
your skin in a caress.
You shimmer. Kelp touches
you like a lover’s fingers.
it’s becoming my dream
You have no need to breathe.
Amazing fish, coral, sponges,
anemone all welcome you.
The undersea joins you in dance.
like the music in my dreams
But when you surface you see
only water and sky. No waves
point the way to an invisible
shore. Nobody comes to
where am I?
your rescue. Nobody hears
the calls you don’t make. In
the giant ocean you find yourself
lost, alone, complete, serene.
That's a really good poem.
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ReplyDeleteYes, the dream of becoming an underwater being. I think it is likely a universal one. My telling of it is as follows:
ReplyDeleteI let go and let the current usher me forward. No desire to breathe, nothing to worry about. I feel like I'm swimming without swimming, moving without moving. My arms rest easily at my sides. My fingers have found natural positions along my thighs, as if remembering some long-forgotten dance. Curved, relaxed, neither opening nor closing, they settle into themselves as a cellist's fingers on the fingerboard. There will be no shocks, no surprises, no sudden moves. There will be freedom with order, as Pablo Casals was known to say with a stirrup tightened firmly around the word "with." My hair swirls behind me like sleepy lagoon grass. A warm pulse of water opens behind me. I feel as if the pulse knows where I'm going, as if some long-pinched tendon running from the top of my head to my toes has finally relaxed. I watch the bottom appear as a dark gray shroud. I feel the pulse in my hair, as if my body were surrounded by warm and relaxing condensations of light. Old light, somehow whole light, pre-industrial light. Alive, the pulse races me forward. Brilliant gypsum-white sand meanders above me like a firmament of tuning forks. Those figures race and split and coalesce into new forks -- right side up, upside-down, Y's fusing together and fanning out. Miles or continents or centuries away, I sense that the whales know I'm here, as if I'm in the company of mothers singing to mothers, as if they are following me, my scent, my heat moving across the velvet currents of the sea.