wrong finger
in the air —
stop testing the idiot wind
and start rejecting it

As far as I can discover, it doesn’t exist —
there is no Sweetwater, NY.

So the dream that ended there,
the dream in which I drove all the way to Sweetwater while asleep
has to be symbolic, as does the extra steering wheel
I spent an afternoon installing while parked in a driveway
on a farm where no one was home while the sun fell lower and lower
off to my left as I pulled unfamiliar things from the glove box:
the disc camera, the grey gloves covered in soot, the baby toys.

And the family that came home and were remarkably unperturbed
to find the shaggy man flat on his back in their driveway
must represent something, perhaps some forgotten obligation
to settlement and peace, as they welcomed me in and offered me cornbread
as if I was an old friend. When I finally recognized the mother
as someone I’d known years ago and we hugged so comfortably,
when I finally kissed them all farewell with their address
on a postcard tucked into my pocket (and I would know that handwriting
if I saw it now, awake now as I am) so I could find them again
if I came that way, it must have meant something, and I drove home
certain of all these things, steering from the passenger seat with the setting sun
behind me, cruising home through a flat landscape
that looked like gold spread all around me.

I choose to believe in the meaning of this,
just as I choose to believe
that the beginning of the dream
was of no importance, was just an introduction,
was just some experience translated
from the room around me as I slept: the waking up in terror,
still driving but not on the road anymore,
straight out across flat stubbled fields,
forcing myself to turn back toward that road that would lead me
to the farm in Sweetwater where the rest of the vision would unfold —

I can still taste
the cornbread, sweet and crumbly with fresh butter;
I have nearly forgotten
the sound of the shattered cornstalks
under my wheels
as I drove.

she announces that finally she can say out loud
some things she’s been waiting to say
now that both of her parents
have passed

I think I have said
those things already
so what will I say
when mine have gone

will I give up war
focus on peace
will I give up
entirely

shall I be the one
to come back
to the subject
clean things up

or will everything remain
as it is now but with me at last
standing under my own precarious sword
now that they are no longer game

I have nothing to announce here
for the moment
but in the way her shoulders have risen
from their customary slump

I suspect that there will be
work for me to do
long after I am in a position
to decide how to react to the same thing

we once fantasized
that we were
born feathered

always saw ourselves
with wings
with layers and wisps aflutter
all around
as we lifted off

assumed
that we could take with us
everything we always carried
expected our bones
to remain solid

forgetting how hollow
a bird actually is

and none of us noticed
that all birds land
eventually

today I saw you
still in flight
but with plumage rough as a wet hen
as you nattered on to the nestlings
that live on inside you

we were too young
to fly
when we laid the pills
upon our tongues and swallowed
with our heads raised toward
mother sky

in all these years
you have managed not
to come down to where we are

and you’re so tired now
I almost want to draw a bead
upon you and
fire

in the hope of offering some rest
hoping that your last feathers
will give you their long withheld comfort
as they fall soft around you
when you stretch out upon
hard and inevitable ground

in this new world, the one we attend
upon arriving from our funerals,
it becomes clear that we are not
unified on how we choose our passions:

at times in our lives we were guided to things
that were in and of themselves pleasurable to us,
while sometimes we were taken by the comfort
of filling holes in ourselves, and the things

with which we filled a hole meant less to us
than that the hole was filled, even for a moment,
even though we knew we would be empty again,
and that we’d look for that filling again.

so, while the love of food for some was honest love for
the oil of cured olives fat on our lips, or for the rosemary sprig
pulled through the teeth and savored for its burned
and its bitter, for some of us all that mattered

was how eating capped the dry well inside us, and the flavor
of anything was secondary to how feeding
forced hunger back into its cave, so we fed often
and unwisely, not heeding the taste or the joy in tasting.

each of those backward passions often led to another:
the yearning for sex stopped up our lust, the lust was a way
to stop the indifference to our own lives, indifference a stop to loneliness,
loneliness a way to hold off surrender to the larger urge to bond.

in the new world we are not that fragile, not as subject
to the whim of the vacant moment. we see the others as admirable,
complete before now, brought here to validate the holy pleasing
of pleasure as its own end. the first good day of wholeness has come for us —

but in the remnants of our old minds we wonder: was there something
to be said for those of us who were never full, always expecting the next best thing
to come and make us whole while still in full life, and did we learn something
in that search that the others did not see? did we not fill them

with the fruits of our searching? we made the things that made them
happy — the books, the songs, even the food. we were the people
who they met and loved without imagining the depth of our desire
to just roll over and fall asleep, content not just for once but for always.

it doesn’t matter now. in the new world, we do not invent reasons
to seek what is in front of us. we pull grapes into our mouths and
are happy to settle for just one, believing that perfection is always present…
still, to some of us it is unfortunate that the next one cannot possibly be better.