SACRILEGE OF DREAM
In this poem my dreams stir
in another's bed, that I can sleep
straight through the night.
It is she who watches the bright
blast furnace works blaze and fade
to wavering food bank lines.
She is the one who stockpiles
canisters and bags of food enough
to survive some other holocaust.
The ants invade her cupboard store
in a cover of thick and black movement.
She hides from wind along
the path behind her father's
staggering overcoat.
She paces hospital corridors,
his head wired for electro shock.
She worries about madness
slicing the air in currents
on hebephrenic tongues.
In her bed she coughs up
her grandfather's slow death
emphysema. Her chest tightens
at both sides of a family's failed
hearts. It is she that breaks
the promise to quit
smoking after 30 years.
In her bed, it is she who fears
her own hand at her breast
passed on in maternal order,
sleepwalks radiation, wraps
thinning chemo hair, pulls
uselessly at wisps of bangs
to hide the creases in her brow.
She dreams her son skidding
the highway sideways,
tractor trailer broadsided crossing
the lane in the first rain
after long drought. She races to him,
shortcuts bad neighborhoods,
gets lost flying down deadend hills
with brakes and an empty gas tank.
She shuffles night alone,
not remembering where she was
headed with a dog tracking her heels,
bred not to loosen at the bite.
She endures the restlessness,
calls up and itemizes all the things
undone, done badly, afraid to do.
She stares wildly into night,
jolted awake by her own scream.
She trembles and weeps.
In her bed she rocks herself back
to sleep, then rides a veering trolley
screeching to a halt before the river edge.
She fears the sudden death, drowning
in another attempt to learn to swim
and float, swim and float.
In that other bed, she is the one who
wakes midnight hungover, knocks over
the loose loft rail and falls on the way
to a Valium. She lands to ply airflight
insurance machines with counterfeit
bills, missing the connection from there
to anywhere, there to anywhere.
She stares at the puffy bag of skin
swelling on her cheek, performs
penknife surgery in a public restroom,
is left with one butchered bulbous eye.
It is her teeth that loosen
and are spit out like so many spent
dried shells of chewed seeds.
It is in her bed that she cradles
a heating pad to her belly
between hipbones carved
from diet pills and skipping meals.
Her bed goes up in flames
as she dares sleep
straight through night
In this dream, it is I who lives on
past the night she dies. In this poem,
I rise to write her epitaph.
Copyright © Andrena Zawinski 2001