Dreamwork, ii
In my first post on dreamwork, I offered the invitation to take pieces of dreams and expand them in a creative channel.
In the last several days (over the planetary magnetic peak cycle, August 11-13th, 2020), I woke up with the sensation of being “sodden with dreams”.
This phrasing and its implied weight directed me towards pondering the physicality of dreams, the way that it is the body who experiences the dreaming.
My invitation to you: again playing with your dreams, see if you can zero in on the physicality of your dreams.
What body-imprints, memories, sensations, postures, breathing patterns, or movements can you recall, that felt embodied to you during the dreamtime?
What does the dreaming body have to share about what it witnessed in its night travels?
~~
Two dreams took turns in the night.
Each pressed their lips
to my cheeks, formed a seal
a rose-red print.
In the first you are my friend again.
We are sitting in a car and the surprise is
that it's me, not you, who has moved on.
You have been tucked back into a drawer
of silks and underthings. Your mouth is soft
and wet and you have a way
of crying your way through things.
Can I feel guilty for something like this?
When I wake up I know it's a dream
because you would never let me
move on first.
In the second my sister is marrying again,
in a procession of banners, papers,
cups of tea, white mist. She calls me
on the telephone to tell the groom
that she cannot make it. I am forming
balls of rice into egg shapes
with my free hand.
In the third realm you have gone,
as suddenly as you came. My sadness is a silver
foil to press together. Hammer it around
the rock inside. You will never know
the endless dimensions of magic
you could have walked. You will never
know how much I practiced
the moment you turn to me,
forever mine.
II.
I am a player in a piece
of theater, I have lost my lines
day-colored, light-vanishing, slipping in the nets of silver
so I am making them up, inked purple
and blue from deep waters. They arrive
on my lips, full of baggage,
elegant shoes, belts that match, sparkled rings,
wringing hands, tinted shades. It is the time of another arrival,
from the octopus welts and grappling arms.
On stage, curtain call to curtain fall.
I am in the mystery, a player and speaker
of lines, and my intensity shakes the walls,
i am a vibrato, a throat, a voice,
and his voice comes through me to shake my walls,
hound the glass, shake things up,
shake the walls of the turret, the core of clay and foam
and bedded bits of glass to let in the firing light.
Here I am wandering back and forth, lightly,
wavering, waves in my mind and in my heart,
foundering, the great walls,
the give of clay even baked,
the shine of glass, the heaving of rocks,
towers mounted and heavy.
This is my truth in the forest
that is Istanbul, clots and clumps, gatherings of buildings, accretions,
mushrooms, holed against the coast,
golden horn, horns of gold,
golden call of animals. the rampage,
the riot, the reveling, the call,
amplified prayer call sung out high and hard
through the shaking streets of the watered wet clay,
this great wilderness in the call, the loss of green.
Here I am his throat, again, I am, it is, she thinks,
he wills, in the gullet, the goat sac of my gut,
the breathing horn.
III.
I reached into the soft cloth bag and you were there,
moist, crumbling in my hands,
but there. Half-mountained
into dirt and papier mache
but there. my solar system,
anemone, my seam.
The body basket came to me in a picture,
through the foot stamping and clatter of hooves
we made the weekend in the country,
and then you were an empty space.
but in my dream, pieces of messages,
you were in my soft cloth bag
and my hands could see you,
in the richest, loosest soil I ever
laid myself on. and the word you made
was so clear, it was like when you think there is no glass
in the window frame but there is
its just so pure you cannot see it
~~
Thumbnail image is from a church in Lisbon