January Light
Occupation dream:
paperboy tromping through snow at dawn, licensing clerk hunting copyright
infringements, green teacher talking too much to teens about her love life.
Animal dream:
ladybug, deer, corpse of lion seal. “In the dream I know I am going to the
shore to see the carcass of a lion seal.”
Landscape dream:
It begins as one and has all the characteristics of a western landscape coming
up from the sea, not a person in sight, not a thing personified.
I remember once
as a young man clipping an article about diplomats from nearly ninety nations
gathering in Oslo to ban antipersonnel landmines by treaty. A French delegate
like a figure in a dream calls it one of the rare moments in international life
where the reasons of state encounter the sentiment of peoples. Invade my
pillow. Dust my feet. He prompts my dream of a beach I can see as a child from
my bedroom window. The sun is low, the water rough and reddish. Those few
people gathered in the lower righthand corner can’t take a step without falling
on what looks like infantrymen’s helmets, olive drab, buried halfway to their
crowns in the sand. No one moves without being killed or maimed. Years later I
am awake for this and looking at a photograph of the selfsame beach, the sun
low down and the water, rough and oily looking. Helms made heart-shaped by
nature, carried overtop olive-green bodies eternal, waddling out of the ocean.
A caption reads: Mexico’s olive ridley sea turtle makes a comeback. They
return to their natal beaches to form mass nestings along the Pacific coast,
far from fields rigged against wanderers.[1]
Synthesis: She
imagines her children as heliotropes, standing at different angles from the
slope, the sun itself a smudge like a thumbprint, the flowers themselves
throwing long sparse shadows.
[1] The Spanish arribar (to arrive) derives
from Latin ad- (to)
+ ripa (shore/bank).
An arribada is the
synchronous mass-nesting event of hundreds or thousands of sea turtles arriving
on the same beach to lay eggs.
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