7/31/2012
She dreams in sepia,
like old photographs, silent movies.
Her dreams are painted
in every soft shade of brown:
tan, beige, taupe, sand.
She lives in a desert,
the city of Albuquerque,
where most houses are adobe
in construction and in color,
dried mud.
In winter, the grass dies,
and the tumbleweeds turn
grey as newsprint, pale as straw.
The trees are brown;
even the pines are coated in dust.
Her world is brown, thus her dreams are
brown.
Even the sky,
brilliantly deep cobalt blue,
is always grey in her dreams,
covered with thunderheads
that never rain.
She dreams in colors of sand and
anticipation.
She dreams dry.
As a child, she is drawn to green
spaces.
Her grandfather's farm
with wide fields of alfalfa,
cool shady orchards,
deep oceans of corn.
The mountains, like dozing bears
thickly furred in aspen and pine.
The bosque, two thin green ribbons
bordering the Rio Grande.
When she travels,
it is the green spaces she remembers:
green-shouldered mountains in Colorado,
green-carpeted hills around San Diego,
the banana tree in her uncle's back
yard
in San Francisco, tall redwoods in
Oregon,
the painful, emerald green of Hawaii.
None of this prepares her for Boston.
On her first trip, at the age of 16,
she mistakes the Charles River for a
lake.
She does not recognize the massive trees
that border Memorial Drive as
sycamores,
compared to their anemic desert
cousins.
She dances in every rainstorm that
comes.
Still, her dreams do not begin to change
until she returns there to live,
starting college at seventeen,
and even then, it takes months.
But one night –
one night, she wakes,
heart pounding.
In her dream, she walked
with her father beside an arroyo.
They were going fishing, poles slung
over shoulders.
The banks of the arroyo were thick with
reeds and cattails,
and in the dream, they were green,
bright as a child's watercolor.
The water was a muddy blue,
and after waking, she realizes that
it wasn't the water itself that was blue.
It reflected the sky.
Years later,
she remembers that dream,
can still taste the sizzle
of wonder on her tongue.
She does not mind
that the rest of the dream
stood stiff and brown as cut
cardboard.
It took practice, the work of months, years,
to learn enough trust in color
to dream it each night.
---------
My elder daughter has been reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, and I've been rereading them with her. Tonight, when I went to my Mom's Night Out, I was tired from a highly stressful roller coaster of a week and wrung out with relief that a good resolution is near. So I went to my normal Tuesday haunt, the Gulu Gulu Cafe in Salem with a copy of Farmer Boy instead of my laptop, because I thought I was too tired to write.
More fool I. I sat there and read as I sipped my latte, thinking in the back of my head that perhaps someday I should write about my childhood for my children as Wilder had. When the check came, I closed the book, and it hit me that I already have, but in poetry. And as soon as I thought that, this poem sprang, half-formed and begging to be written, into my head. And I had no laptop and no paper to write on. So I came home, before the girls had even fallen asleep, went straight to my laptop, and banged it out.
All you writers out there are laughing at me, I'm sure, and I don't mind a bit. I have found, at last, the practice of writing, and it is a firmly ingrained and rather stubborn habit, whether I like it or not.
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