The Dream Sequence
Friday I’m reading at East City Bookshop with Faisal Mohyuddin and Simone Roberts. They are stunning humans and you should come.
A few weeks ago I reread The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. I first read it some time ago, then lent my copy to someone. Then a month ago I had the desire to reread it so I ordered a new copy only to find a copy I’d ordered whenever I’d last had that reread Kundera feeling on the bookshelf in my living room. Honestly wtf is wrong with me. (Note that I haven’t included a question mark here. I don’t want that answered) I wanted to share something from it with you but couldn’t decide what and that’s been delaying my posting. So here’s something to satisfy my need to feel like I’ve shared this novel with you:
Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.
Phew. Done. Read it. I love it. But I have no prompt from it immediately.
I had this poem by Louise Gluck saved as a draft and this morning I reread it and it took my breath away like it must have the first time I read it, when I saved it here. Yesterday my mom told me about a dream she had and that’s been on my mind and hers and so I guess this is the prompt. Write a poem in 4 parts like this one. Maybe it starts out about a dream you had. And you just follow and find out what you think. Or you could use the first few words of every section as your entry points. These last two lines, right?
Visitors from Abroad
Louise Glück
1
Sometime after I had entered
that time of life
people prefer to allude to in others
but not in themselves, in the middle of the night
the phone rang. It rang and rang
as though the world needed me,
though really it was the reverse.
I lay in bed, trying to analyze
the ring. It had
my mother’s persistence and my father’s
pained embarrassment.
When I picked it up, the line was dead.
Or was the phone working and the caller dead?
Or was it not the phone, but the door perhaps?
2
My mother and father stood in the cold
on the front steps. My mother stared at me,
a daughter, a fellow female.
You never think of us, she said.
We read your books when they reach heaven.
Hardly a mention of us anymore, hardly a mention of your sister.
And they pointed to my dead sister, a complete stranger,
tightly wrapped in my mother’s arms.
But for us, she said, you wouldn’t exist.
And your sister — you have your sister’s soul.
After which they vanished, like Mormon missionaries.
3
The street was white again,
all the bushes covered with heavy snow
and the trees glittering, encased with ice.
I lay in the dark, waiting for the night to end.
It seemed the longest night I had ever known,
longer than the night I was born.
I write about you all the time, I said aloud.
Every time I say “I,” it refers to you.
4
Outside the street was silent.
The receiver lay on its side among the tangled sheets,
its peevish throbbing had ceased some hours before.
I left it as it was;
its long cord drifting under the furniture.
I watched the snow falling,
not so much obscuring things
as making them seem larger than they were.
Who would call in the middle of the night?
Trouble calls, despair calls.
Joy is sleeping like a baby.
