taproot dreaming
For years I have been having trouble with sleeping. If I could get to bed by 1:30 or 2 in the morning and be awake at 5:30 or 6 to start my day I would consider it a good night's rest. As a result I had trouble recalling any dreams, since my REM sleep was so poor. However, I have had one dream recently I could recall.
As a small child, I lived for a while in a little cabin in the mountains of Pinos Altos (Tall Pines), New Mexico, located about six miles north of Silver City. Even though most of the town has been turned into a trailer park for retirees (a fate that seems to be spreading everywhere in the Southwest) there was a time when the population of the town was less than 150 (including the packs of roving dogs) and the idea of other people, including neighbors, was just that, "an idea."
The cabin we lived in, three rooms I believe, was at the edge of the forest that came down off the mountain and ended where the tall grasses began. None of this is important to the poem I wrote this morning except for one thing. Sometimes at night, as I lay in my little bunk with my brother sleeping near by, I would look out the dark glass and swear there was some large animal on its hind legs moving about only a few feet away. A bear, most likely. I woke up this morning thinking about that. What was it? I do not recall telling anyone about it and I am sure if, at winter, there had been any tracks in the snow my brother would've been the first to spot them. He was an avid collector at the time and wanted to go out and collect "footprints" of my father and I walking to the bus stop for me to go to school.
It is hard not to attribute my own fears and phobias of adult life to my small wondering self, looking out at the great beyond. It is hard not to want to reshape whatever it was outside into my own nightmares: "and what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" Indeed. What rough beast?
Indeed, I ask no one in particular, what rough beast?
the poem at the root of
the world is the unfurled
poem the night bull
breathing is the curled
lightning is the uncurled
grassland in the plateau'spasture let it be that
one the mesa's
tableland let it be
the one you cannot tell
who is there at
the root? before
the war poem. before
the famine poem.
before the poem
that rounds up your people
for market. there was
the root. the bull
paused and
began to speak.