from Dreamscapes from the Atlas of Coming and Going

III

If returning means September’s grayed-down mood is still a long swim to your father’s crab pots, I’ve overheard it in an airport. If cruelty starts off small and tells a joke something like love, I’ve sensed childhood one state line after another. And if I listen close enough to the hard place sworn against, a pulse pushes the marsh inland until a brackish ghost of forest, until you find the red-winged blackbird your father shot. That he bothered with Dropped from the reed mid-song could’ve been remorse. Tell me, little darlin’, isn’t that far enough? What, then, is left to hold on to but the waves? The steady repeat of their own terms. The tangle of laughs and bones they carry.

IX

His surname had something to do with pianos. So, the dream throws an old upright into the lake I’ll just call girlhood. Look, moon, you try embroidering virginity’s cutoffs with little white daisies and tell me it’s not a lost art, that someday won’t turn your halo factual as ice and light. Then, forget Dad’s gospel truth about men—give back the loot from my aquarium’s treasure chest. That sparkled canoeing past cottonmouths on a long list of forbiddens (the first kiss saving its venom for prey). Suppose we spoke, moon, in dreamsunk terms of church camp and moving out west, anyway. We’d say a trail to the lake. We’d say a clearing’s the place the hymnal always falls open.

X

Call this a jewel box in which we place our most abstract treasures yet understand each other. As for me, here’s a wad of paper I tell you is a picture of God. I don’t have to take it from the jewel box to know it’s there—always—like God says he is, as well as my father with my mother kneeling in his shadow, and the rest of the jagged strand I can’t pray smooth. One night, a dream uncrumpled the paper, revealing a question mark—small but illuminated, as if torn from the diary of a saint. I hold the jewel box open, knowing only the firmament is beyond measure, ready for whatever part of it you bring.

XII

Remember where the highway slowed down for business that wasn’t, the old synagogue, the absent caretaker, the startled barn owl? Where you met the guy who told you this, brilliant as Blake’s treeful of angels—there must’ve been one for each day committed to Whitfield. He believed in a better place than a postcard from war: boarded up, dusty, kept moss-draped for tourists. So did the merchants’ kids, the sharecroppers’ kids. He said first came monuments, then pillars of salt still turned toward cannon fire. Fire—as were his eyes, right? He said he’d tried to leave town, sometimes the house, even to open the mail. Invited or not, the barn owl gliding over his shoulder has traveled on with you.

Read more from Issue 20.2.