Written by Greer McAllister
(These may no longer be dreams.)
[But, before it all] it’s simple. Forsythia and chocolate tort in the morning. It’s sunny and I weep for my parents.
[Last month] I go into the bathroom and pull out my mother’s hairbrush. I’m just visiting and I forgot mine. It is packed with a thick layer of dark blonde hair I did not inherit.
[Morning] I feel bad about throwing away the newspaper today. Old world in the garbage can.
[Day] a new way of thinking: not enlightened, but peaceful. I am tucked away in the corner of my room, in the corner of my apartment, in the corner of this city, in the corner of this world, and I have, gently, overcome.
“Life won’t always be so easy.”
“I know.”
[Dusk] so we’re talking about space, space between the lines.
Once, I was a young dancer. A visiting instructor told me I say more with the space between my movements than the dance itself.
I tell him, “thank you.”
He says it wasn’t a compliment.
[Night] heavy snow today fell fast like a woman letting down her hair with frustration, or a line of identical cars speeding down the highway.
Soon, the sun sets and everything is pink, including you and me. Pink bodies on pink bodies, a few men pile them on top of each other and cart them away.
Next, I blush because you compliment my hands, the way they look like your mother’s. I hold them out so you can see them better.
Eyes blink slowly as the piano begins. I watch as you close your eyes, the music playing us out. I finally sleep and we are brought out the front door and onto the men’s cart with the others.
[Dream] making love to my ex.
[Dream] I am in a foreign country in a small city, maybe in Germany. I am with a woman and her baby girl. We are walking around the town mall and trying to think of a name for her daughter. Then, while she is paying for something, a cat, an orange cat, walks over to me. It is very sweet and has a broken leg. A few feet away, I see a man that I know and walk over to say hello. It has been a while. I tell him and the woman about the orange cat, but we all leave without helping it.
[Dream] making love to my ex, purring cats.
[Morning] a sunny morning. Scorn myself later for not appreciating it.
[Early afternoon] again, I am out walking. I reach a park that's not really a park. Wooded mudland, twisted with trash and vine-wrapped trees. I feel moved by the sun and decide to trek into the land, off the road.
Amongst the trees are large boulders, broken glass, deflated plastic, a rusted chainsaw, and a metal filing cabinet. Most surprisingly, is a small, thriving bamboo forest near the back of the park. Someone must have planted it long ago, not knowing its invasive nature or believing it could survive the New York winters.
I step down into the tall green stalks. In the center, there are seven folding chairs arranged in a circle. I can only imagine what goes on in the bamboo forest.
Passing stars overhead, dripping-green seance, seven souls among the reeds, broken beer bottles glinting pieces and pieces of their bodies, words, whispers, shouts.
Soft declarations of love.
Little youth.
Looking past the leafy canopy to heaven, clutching your coat, trudging back up, out to the
road.
[Late afternoon] the buzz of coffee, the world is bright and textured. Beauty mark on my jawline.
[Night] there is nothing I want to do more than write. My sister calls me in tears. She has just finished reading some poems I sent her.
“The birds in the last poem were the birds at grandma’s funeral.”
“Of course. There were so many that day.”
“A thousand birds along the highway.”
She says it’s like I’m writing just for her. We don’t know if others will understand.
[Night, high] broken geode, friends laughing.
Itching palms, picking agates like berries from the shore, stopping at roadside cemeteries with my father even though we have no relatives residing there.
[Late] I could tell you that I prayed to the Virgin Mary as a girl. Her blue bust reached out of the church wall during Wednesday afternoon mass, paint chipping off her milky white face.
At night, I would wish to her like a star in the sky. I could see her just past the lilacs, sitting on top of the moon, swinging her legs off the side. Her veil could reach all the way down to my backyard, the end fluttering against my bedroom window. When I opened it, I would see her wiggling her toes, could hear her laughing.
[Dream] I have the eyes of a cat. A certain man is afraid of me. Fuzzy black and white. I show him my new black dress. He is still afraid.
[Dream] the brunette girl brushing her long hair slowly. An absent look in her eye.
[Morning] soft sheets for my body, sheets gone soft from my body.
Collecting old glass bottles for the windowsill, coffee with lots of cream but no sugar.
[Afternoon] sometimes I shuffle a deck of tarot cards to keep my hands busy.
My maternal grandmother taught my sister and me to read tarot years ago. She has been reading cards for her friends since she was my age, wives attempting to read their future while mourning their youth. She sat with the two of us one afternoon. Our other grandmother, our father’s mother, had just passed away and she was in town for the funeral. She read cards for each of us, one after the other, and pulled every card about grief in the deck. We all sat there in awe.
Now, as I shuffle, a single card falls out. The Star. Harmony, hope, relief. A nude woman kneeling on the shore, holding one jar of scalding hot water and another of cold, pouring them into the sea continually. A large star hangs above her long trailing hair.
I place it back in the pile quickly and keep shuffling. Again, the same card falls out of the deck, landing on the floor. I gather it all up frantically and I pick a card from the middle– for the third time, the Star.
Again, I sit in awe, because I know it is the brunette girl from my dreams. She must live on that night-shore, kneeling in front of that water, continually.
[Evening] broken robin’s egg on the sidewalk. So small, can barely see the yolk splattered like paint.
[At night] I look at pictures from over the years. Only took pictures of myself, obsessed by my own image.
My mother never let my sister and I have mirrors in our bedrooms growing up. She read in a book somewhere that it damages young girls’ self esteem.
Some of the pictures are serious, some are childish. It is these that make me feel a certain kind of sadness. If only I could apologize.
[Memory] ground bees flying in the clover one Sunday. My parents decide we will stop attending church. I tell them I can’t abandon her.
[Dream] the smell of a person I don’t recognize.
[Dream, morning] I am in a foreign city with my father, mother, and sister. The people around us are speaking french. We are tired from walking. We rest near a cafe in the full morning sun, so bright we have to squint our eyes to see each other.
When I awake I am alone in my bedroom, far away from France or my family, but my bed is full of the same morning sunlight, so sunny I have to squint to see, to see that everything is a cream color, and full of that sadness, including my pale body.
[Noon] it must be spring now. The sun is a companion along the way, on the train, on this train.
“Where are we going?”
“Well, do you want to come with me?”
“Can I?”
“Of course. Sometimes I get sick of the sun.”
[Afternoon] a crow that sounds like a dog, like daffodils. Daffodils don’t grow where I’m from.
Moon in the blue sky. Blue sky like blue lily, like love, like licking your lips to get the last taste, like living as someone else because life hasn’t been so kind.
I could be dipped in coffee and eaten up if I wanted. I have been offered this. I told him no, not right now, maybe later.
[Late afternoon] my sister reminds me of the ancient church-house on the block we grew up on. For a long time, it had a small religious bookstore in the foyer. Its owners cooked in the old parish kitchen and slept up in the choir loft like angels.
[Dream, dusk] purple evening, and I begin to remember all the moments of my life I have forgotten.
When I was seventeen I visited Vienna. I decide now that she looked like this city, the brunette girl: plaster walls and gold trim, and when I walked through her markets and churches, there was nothing but incense and rainwater, the curve of her question-mark spine, knobby knees, asking, “Do I look okay?”
Maybe she looked like the women of Schiele and maybe not. I don’t want to tell her.
Maybe she was a dancer as a girl, like I was, comparing in the mirror our waists, our arms, the length of our hair.
Now, the white morning gives her away. Her dark down, her body-taste.
Miracle.
[Late] always looking out the window, framed by the pane. I will never be immortalized.
[Dream] something about a widow, a red-breasted robin.
[Dream, morning] when I awake, she is gone and I am alone with myself.
I think the cat is hungry for his breakfast.
[Dream, late morning] the I, the eye. The absence of music, the crab apple tree– dead cats buried underneath.
[Dream, midday] Where do you think she’s gone?
Flowers For Dinner
White Morning
Lace Lake
The Lace Lake
Morning, Mourning
The Living Living
The Day at Lace Lake
Woman in the Window
[Memory] her veil taps against the waving glass.
[Dream, afternoon] I am sure of it now. A vision of Mary, like the ones where they see her statue weeping. Chipped paint falling from the sky.
[Dream, night] I am standing somewhere high, looking at it all. I hold up a piece of blue glass to my left eye and the sun begins to rise. I walk into my parent’s house that I don’t recognize. I am only visiting.
The empty, warm winters are what I remember most. A mother’s brooch, a fistful of dandelions, a penny, a few books of a father’s, the stars washing overhead.
Would you tell her something for me?
[Dream, dream] something about absence, about incense. Something about praying.