from Midwinter Constellation

1   ☆   dreams

If I could train my dreams it might be
only to be able to remember them.
If dreams might be the impressions left
from yesterday mine would be of lions,
3000 years old, shot with arrows
along a cold expanse of stone, or
the favorite pub of Marx and Engels,
wrapped around with Christmas lights.
Or a golden helmet buried inside a boat
turned into a hill, some trees, the wonder
at who might look at a hill and see it undone,
dug and sifted away, like my daughter
now wiggling out of her blankets,
waking to yet another day
in an unfamiliar city.

☆

Prelude to Dream:

We can trace the I Love You words written in your book
With translucent paper, shake the snowglobe containing
Only snow in front of the white and red candle at 1:11am
On Midwinter Day's eve nearing the Long Night Moon
Seconds ticking down out of this world yet time can stand
Still in a Zone late at night the longest night of the century
Yet morning comes early and bright with the city fog drippings
           Over the veiled buildings  

                        White string lights suspended in a neighbor's
           Window one street over — I will probably never know them

Another bank of windows in front of that — drapes drawn
Diaphanous moon where are you?  Full up there maybe I
Can see you — Yes! Straight over head — the clouds pass

                        In front of you   O moon     interrupted or praised by
             loony laughter from someone  walking down 22nd  Street

People are wet but not too cold tonight — soon it will be
     "Punishing" again as it does get that way up North but
Today is temperate — actually too warm —
             I've been inside
All day except to go to the roof
     and I called Bernadette around 8:15pm
To wish her Happy Solstice and when I told her I had been
Cleaning cleaning so that someday I could finally write a poem
And she says she does not clean anymore —it just makes things more cluttered
           Which I now believe is true    
                                   I've got to quietly move the papers
And boxes I dumped in order to make myself sort and not wake my snoring
        Husband and get to sleep so I can wake up and get on the bus
To go read all of Midwinter Day aloud with others in person and
          on the ether waves

I start to get the late night stillness effect and begin to see
   All of these strange things which began to surface from my cleaning
Like an advent calendar with its original
Red envelope which need only be opened 3 more days til Xmas

What presents I do buy I usually lose and then find later
      And eventually get them to their rightful owners
   Why is it that I have so many objects swirling around me?
The Letter M on a monogram in a catalogue —
   Was it chosen because it's in the middle of the alphabet?
or because it stands for monogram?   I love all the Letters!
          I've got a branding iron from my great-grandfather's ranch
  That says "V.D." for Van Dunlop —     how's that for branding?

         I wonder who of the other poets writing this poem are AWAKE
  Like me     and it's already Dawn in Amsterdam!

One more time to go see the moon
She's moved further over   
             Can't see her  from my window
    And now to Dream

+

Only image

Only action I can hold onto
    Is the necessity of pulling root vegetables
Up from ground and storing for winter
   Parsnips, carrots, stored again in sand to be replanted in Spring — maybe it's what my great-great grandmother whose name was America had to do in Montana or maybe it's related to those strange turnip-like beings I saw floating in the pool a few months ago and I pulled one out and wrapped it in a blanket like an ugly humanoid subconscious thought that needs to be swaddled and fed and taken everywhere like an adult-sized baby.

Jennifer who is skilled in dream combing observed that I often dream about getting things for free like when I ducked through the line into the movie theater and I first thought this was a bad thing like a moral judgment as when CD laughed at me for taking a roll or two of toilet paper from the Crab House restaurant in Providence when I was a poor grad student, then I thought of my early obsession with the Borrowers and how they made a life from "borrowed" objects like a cigarbox with a fan for a headboard for Arrietty's bed and a spool for a table but then I think of how so much of what I write is "borrowed" from the words around me beaming in to start or write the poems

+

I've been remembering my dreams in technicolor detail and writing them up or down til about 2 weeks ago and then they have kinda submerged but somehow give further energy to the mind of day

☆

Silas has been talking in his sleep throughout the night
and now rolled off his mattress onto the hallway floor.
He sleeps in a closet meant to house a washer and dryer
our temporary year. Can the year itself be temporary?
Yes, it can. I dreamed I wasn't doing well, but there
was pleasure in seeing a stage full of children dressed
in Native American cottons like the ones Cathy showed.
I recognize them as midwestern, particularly the red bead-bib tops.
Bruno sleeps, their father is here and sleeps too, landed
at one in the morning. Bruno will have nightmares and Silas
will have had nightmares because most of what humans have
is nightmares. Their father won't remember his dream. I swing
a little virtuous rising early, but there's a flood of work to correct
me. A machine hums chewing mold out of the small atmosphere
of my bedroom, an expensive and subtle iron lung. No. A real
iron lung would probably have cost a great deal more. I took
my pill when I fell off the bed, actually, says Silas and he has.
Every morning I must check to see if the children have taken
their pills. They don't grow larger without them. We turn on
the pinkish lights of the artificial tree and the star-shaped lights
wrapped about the real wreath and a lamp on the table we bought
in the woods for $25 from people who'd won the lottery. Silas draws
a card for a multi-player game he created. It takes place in a demon realm.
Hearing about someone's multi-player game is the same as hearing about
someone else's dream. That is, it's easier to get interested if it's well-told
and I like to hear I've appeared in either, which often I have.

☆

The root of desire is intimacy;
the root of intimacy, desire.

I dreamt I was on a bike ride down curvy country roads with my ex-husband. He was being followed, but somehow I wasn't. I was pointing out all the good hiding places up ahead — how about that barn among the sheep, etc. He wouldn't get off the road, the bicycle. Was he a wolf among sheep or a victim among men? Was I trying to keep him safe or trying to get rid of him? Why don't men seize opportunities to save themselves along the way? Who am I to believe in salvation?

The sun is not yet up over the trees.

☆

I can't emerge from dreams and record them because there are no dreams, there is no sleep, there is no Google Doc; I cut myself off, I guess, from my imagination, my friends, the collective. There's only the baby, who is old enough that I should be sleeping, but who only sleeps at my breast; there's my sick husband, my sick mother; there's the drive through the night, my resentments, just give me an hour, thirty minutes, do you want me to throw you out the window, I hate you, the Christmas tree glowing its solstice, your consolation is this light in darkness, this proof that life is beautiful at its cruelest, fucking Yule is your dreaming now

3:03 I dreamed something, for a minute. End the year at the house where you grow up

6:08 dreams of villains and fiscal responsibility; Marilyn killed Lily (her avatar/old self?) through debt

Stuffed dates three ways; missing the marathon, parties. Baby slept so well (for 4 hours) that the bed is a lake of milk (IRL)

6:31 girls in tits out???
(later: what did this mean? Prediction of my morning: they were?)

☆

                                    I woke myself dreaming this poem,
some lines about a tiny table with a heap of words on it
and the ache in my jaw I get sometimes
when I grind my teeth so hard I cracked one
and had to go to Dr. Sheth to get a crown
                                                                    Now I'm finally
the queen I'm meant to be I joked, but it's 4:34 am
& I wonder if you're up too, dreaming this poem.
I've woken Shawn who brings me a glass of water, who I want
to tell about the earlier dream involving the pink squares
I rearranged on the screen
                                            but I reach over for the eucalyptus oil,
drop some on my wrist so I can breathe it while I sleep.
Eucalyptus is dusty gray, with those little round leaves. All
the notifications on my phone are about a partial
government shutdown, midnight's glass slipper, &
Katy sent an email about some hashtags.
                                                                   Later I'll give some
to the poem if it seems like a good idea. In What's Your Idea
of a Good Time, Bernadette writes to Bill with whom I once
discussed the spelling of Maybelline as in eyeshadow she writes
about her dentist too, a man who wears a gun! She quit seeing
him saying she prefers being "worked on" by a woman

☆

i wake to dreams draining from my brain, down the circuit of my spine, and into my gut, where some kind of acid will turn them into instincts i can't explain. emotional residue today says i was content or curious in the rooms my subconscious built for me last night — there's none of that after-nightmare panic, and none of the desperate longing to return to whatever situation was salving an ache. time for waking dreams, the ones that have to squirm out from under my superego's ass.                

☆

In gray light I can return to the house in the dream
of Nino Nanette, the cyclist who has lost their peloton
and we have become their surrogate. The French woman
down the street is hosting us but we are very far away
from Powderhorn. The table is wide and we have to invent
the present because the circumstances keep flickering
in the dream but also necessarily in this twilight recall.
As if insistent on staying there the future will not brighten.
                                                            Each iteration has its own aura
and governance like Frank Big Bear's portrait of the Patti Smith's
we passed on the way to artifacts from the sunken city —
each dream here its own cargo — ergo — lost world.
                                                                                            Nino
is fatless and laconic — a dream rendition of our intimacy
or a cris de tour — to move past static interpretations and Nino
is no oligarch or pugilist and Nino is no snowman or debutante
in the nationless morning of the 3rd government shutdown
in two years and Nino is the naked intensity of anarchic refusal
           next to the page beginning I am exhausted.
                               I wake up at 4 something to B at my side
of the bed asking to join us yes of course this is the party and I don't wake again
until gray light, E saying something I can no longer recall
of practical import and me finding myself
with my hands on my head as if I am standing in a windstorm
             and my hat will otherwise blow away. Hey nonny, nonny, crack
your tired cheeks. Belbinus said the book beside me says that Mares
when they smell the smoke of a lamp put out
bring forth their birth before it be perfect.

☆

One long bookshelf, just higher than my head
stretched along a wall of windows looking out onto forest

☆

Whereby my mother turns 65 and takes all yall's crowns I tweet in the dream after going to the yard she in white hair high makeup where there were eyes pink is for the insides fear there too no more meds I cooked something while she stood there looking hot someone said I think that's it all there was nothing about my mother nothing about misha nothing about bridges of madison county i watched for the first time before bed love and how we found each other once nothing about eternal recurrence I read before bed and when from the dream came her words Morning. Ur boy had a good nite while I was down there, till c1215 on my chest he likes to sit, lol and when I move he doesn't go nuts, lolol . . . Another pack came . . . so what time u go to Jeff and Jasmine??? Staying till tomorrow??? My boy my cat peter who is crazy just like she both of them sequestered in her basement like memory while their meds get right peter who i let walk on her lawn i see what kind of mother you're going to make she said another pack package a gift for misha's mother whose 65 birthday (she is the one turning 65 my mother has been there) we will be celebrating in kiev on nye a sky blue planner personalised in gold from bake studios i like that name flown in from australia where i've never been for her to track the most beauty yet jeff and jas bought a lakehouse in put valley and yes i'll be staying there until tomorrow I don't text back

☆

I cannot remember but I woke with a headache. Does it count if I speak about asking for dreams the night before? I lit familial candles aloud surrounding bloom of amaryllis. I woke at 2:42 am and replied to a text from my sister. Yes, I'm ok. But what did I dream?  Dear Bernadette, I'm so ready for Midwinter Day for the light to come back. I stood there calling to the light. Come back! Come back! Luminous light encircling and becoming being. Please do not elude. Dream and calm into presence. Like a steaming bath. I must have dreamt of a mikvah. I've never been in life but I did in dream separate myself from this past year in this way. Is this a dream or is this a body of water? Does it matter? I am immersing. Dear blessed water or dream or light, I love you. Please stay in the stately arms of the embrace of all of our children and ancestors, friends, sisters, loves, remembrance of we.

☆

On the third morning, the linen has become familiar against my cheek. I wake to a creek or a rush I don't know, a sound that fades almost instantly, that hazy no-place — not home & not here. The dream place? Am I always dreaming of another location, of locating myself finally in technicolor, some unmappable surround?

What shoes does one wear to cross the river?

Why do I wake most mornings with only a question — usually mundane. A question & an understanding — that the dreams were long and intricate & it was hard work getting through them. Every morning, waking with new, unreachable knowledge. I feel this heavy today. There was an orange light & there was travel & many voices. My daughter's. Many others. I try, as I always do, to scroll for the dream image, anything that translates better than the truce of having been elsewhere. But the only thing remaining is the question of shoes & water. & the body, which has gone a great distance. 

Last night we listened to Joni Mitchell after dinner, cleaning the kitchen, & then after that, while everyone else drank wine & I watched the snow fall in giant flakes — the kind that in Brooklyn usually meant a short, but gorgeous, flurry. Now I wake with her too, as if she was a witness to the dream — I am traveling, traveling, traveling . . .

I am not home.

In the basement room, the paper-like blinds are backlit. Greylight. Aya shifts on the air bed. The room is filled with sleep breathing, in tandem.

☆

My dreams are tiny, discrete, mostly untroubled — one marching after another like clouds or mice: My grandmother expertly summarizing family complaints, me choosing fillings for bao buns — chicken or crispy duck? There are words I scrawled through half-sleep — "dented," "morose" — having spent the week practicing dreaming and eating foods for the encouragement of dreams. Two garbage trucks begin emptying dumpsters on this block, and Genevieve turns on the news. It's strange, drinking coffee together in the dark amid such sustained catastrophe. 

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Midwinter Constellation was written by Stephanie Anderson, Hanna Andrews, Julia Bloch, Susan Briante, Lee Ann Brown, Laynie Browne, Shanna Compton, Mel Coyle, Marisa Crawford, Vanessa Jimenez Gabb, Arielle Greenberg, Jenny Gropp, Stefania Heim, MC Hyland, erica kaufman, Becca Klaver, Caolan Madden, Pattie McCarthy, Monica McClure, Jenn Marie Nunes, Danielle Pafunda, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar, Khadijah Queen, Linda Russo, Katie Jean Shinkle, Evie Shockley, Sara Jane Stoner, Dawn Sueoka, Bronwen Tate, Catherine Wagner, Elisabeth Workman, and Mia You.

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