The Mother of All Dreams

The dream seems to order its own ripe

Theatrics after what seems like a merciless

Induction round sprawled out on the night stage

Like action characters going off script.

The shadows seem to override any

“Dress as you like” pomp and get down to basic

Coal cellar business with me, a North London

Child wrapped in a Mickey Mouse gas mask

Hearing my mother, as if at a great distance,

Consoling me with a string of “There, there, there, now,”

Words that were swallowed by the thunder

That punished us when the heavens opened

And fell on those buried in coal.

.

I am still in over my head, still underground

In another cellar, another land, another time

In a dark, cluttered place anchored

To my daughter’s third-grade classroom desk

Listening to family sounds above my head

Offering blessing and thanks for my dead

Mother buried a few hours earlier.

I skip through her “Keys to Heaven,”

A 640-page roadmap to the divine,

Looking for turned-down pages, underlined

Passages that said she had found her way.

Then I flee to some other point

Of meditation, a streetlight outside

That shines on her favorite oak tree

And seems to ascend as I meditate.

Now it becomes a star, an angel rising

In what seems an orderly ascent,

Taking the shadow that had covered me

Into the night sky, providing

Peace and deliverance.

.

My mother’s memory returns

Thirty years later in a dream

That took me back to my service

In the Navy in the Tonkin Gulf

On a ship with enough ammunition

To burn North Vietnamese forests down.

In the dream I received a letter

Via helicopter while afloat

From Father Bede, a parish priest

When I was a London altar boy

Saying he would send my mother’s ashes

To me to deposit in the South China Sea.

.

In the dream I struggle with what seemed

Like a divine task, contemplating the direction

Of the winds and, once the remains were delivered

Far from the shadow of a hovering Seventh Fleet,

Would the sea gods return these ashes

To me with a vengeance, flush in the face?

And I am once again at sea.

Going down, going under

Looking for what I have made

And what I have missed

And the shadows beneath the surface

For what I have failed to fathom.