POETRY

Ask Me Who's President

 	In the dream I sit on the steps to a school building, writing in a journal. Someone asks how it's
going & I say, "Well, I had five dreams last night and I'm finally on the last one. It's taken me
all day to record them. Even when they are short they take a long time to write out, you
know?" The person nods with understanding, moves on. I pause during the entry of the 5th
dream to look back over the ones already entered. Each has a title and by reading it I recall the
dream's central image. I flip back to the final entry and "again" run this one through my head:
my cousin and grandmother in the bodies of young girls riding a skateboard together down a
street lined with oak leaves.

	Have you ever fainted? I did once when my mother was altering a bridesmaid dress on me. I
said, "I need to sit down." She said, "Two more pins," I said, "I can't see . . ." and then that
feeling of coming to and having to reorient myself with the earth. When I left I was vertical and
when I came back I was standing with my back against carpet. Then, I saw the carved foot of
the dresser at eye level and remembered gravity, my mother's bedroom floor.

	The first thing I can remember after my car accident two years ago is the paramedic taking my
arm to help me out of the car and me saying, "how did you get here so fast?" I have no idea
how long I'd been there or whether I'd been unconscious. I had on platform shoes. It wasn't
until we stepped up onto the flat highway that I realized my car had been in a ditch. We had
walked up a hill and I was standing and then my back was against something hard and
perfectly flat and I was lying down. Someone's gentle hands on my head. "What day is it?"
The paramedic asked once we were in the ambulance and not wanting to guess wrong I said,
"Ask me who's president."

	I tried to tell the mulberry the night before it was being removed, "This is it tree." I tried to
prepare it and feel a farewell into its sappy trunk. The next evening when I arrived home from
work the driveway was filled to the top of the fence pickets with light. Without that puddle of
mulberry shade each piece of gravel, each daffodil leaf and tulip blossom was equal. For a
moment I could understand a theory of matter in which the blunt stump, the branchless air and
the phone lines hemming it in, the rusted tie plates along the garden path were all composed of
the same tiny particles.

	Can the subconscious be self-conscious? Am I doomed to dream about dreaming, talk about
not being able to say, and search for the spiritual with my five senses? At night I hear the panes
rattle or the picture frames expand and creak against the wall and think my soul is coming to get
me. I panic until I can fall asleep. It isn't that I never feel a slight hiccup in the time-space
continuum and realize there is more than what I can see and hear. It's that no matter how long I
shut my eyes and plug my ears when I open them again, there is the world.