Dream: Soft Focus

I found myself
sinking into my mattress
last night. This was not the weight
of my body sinking in.
The molecules and atoms had found
a way to interweave with each other
and I was settling into the mattress
as if it were a bath of milk. I felt
good, almost terrific, figuring the descent
would end at the denser bedframe, but
that did not happen. Instead I continued
to drop down through the bed, through
the floor, down into the downstairs apartment
(into a storage room, nothing there
but old boxes and such I slid right through)
and on into the basement
and the earth. I moved intact through
dirt and stone, imagining the heat of the core
below me, waiting for me, but soon enough
I stopped and found I could breathe and
once I had stopped I realized that I was
newly impossible. What can I say, I thought,
how can I explain to people how I came to be here,
somewhere below the basement floor? Why
do things like this happen? Maybe somewhere
there’s a timeline for miracles and oddities.
Perhaps they happen on some cycle and this
Saturday night in November was the allotted
time and place for this, and I was just
the one who happened to be here. Maybe Jesus
rose from the tomb this way. Maybe Oswald’s
magic bullet spun because it was there at the right time.
And maybe this was why after a time I began to rise
back through all I’d passed through before.
The particles in dirt and cement and wooden floor
grew warm as I ascended. My body
glowed like a torch until I returned to my bed.
I couldn’t sleep. I got up and wrote this out
with the letters as dense as could be on the page
so that I could not sink into it, even though the keys
of the laptop felt soft and I expected at any moment
that my fingers would poke through them.

Until now when I have lived my life I have expected to be its master.
What will happen if one day I am not, if I blend into the world
the way I blended into my bed? Will there be
anything left of me if I allow myself to breathe
from inside the things and places I see?
What will become of love if I cannot tell what loves
and what is beloved? Somewhere among the neutrons,
quarks, and muons, answers are waiting. I will find a way
to sink into them:
staring at the ceiling,
letting go when the miracle is ready for me.