A DREAM VISIT
Once more
I'm going home to the street of my childhood.
The trolley taking me is going too fast, and I'm afraid I'll miss my
stop. I'm afraid I won't remember it. Shops along the route are not the same. I feel lost, anxious. I pull the cord.
I've reached my street, and it is as it used to be. The ice house on one corner; a candy and tobacco shop on the other. It is a working man's street, one and two family houses on one side and factories on the other.
It is
summer. I inhale a miasma of odors, the
strongest from the Goodyear plant.
12 o'clock–
in the shade, the clanging
of lunch buckets
On this
visit, I am an adult and married. I know
this, although my husband isn't with me.
I am an age I can't determine.
Thirties, forties? Maybe
older. I live at number 42 on the second
floor, above my grandparents. They are
still there, and it makes perfect sense.
I climb the front stairs to the second floor.
the afternoon sun
through the stained glass window—
climbing a rainbow
The flat is
not large, yet we live here, my parents and I, my sister, my husband. My father sleeps heavily. He had died.
Or so I had thought, and I wonder where he's been. My mother indicates the need to be quiet.
mourning
doves call—
in
dreams, neither hellonor goodbye
Contemporary Haibun On-line, Aug. 2005
