Santiago dreams . . .
He did not dream of the lions but instead of a vast school of porpoises that stretched for eight or ten miles and it was in the time of their mating and they would leap high into the air and return into the same hole they had made in the water when they leaped.Then he dreamed that he was in the village on his bed and there was a norther and he was very cold and his right arm was asleep because his head had rested on it instead of a pillow.
After that he began to dream of the long yellow beach and he saw the first of the lions come down onto it in the early dark and then the other lions came and he rested his chin on the wood of the bows where the ship lay anchored with the evening off-shore breeze and he waited to see if there would be more lions and he was happy.
The moon had been up for a long time but he slept on and the fish pulled on steadily and the boat moved into the tunnel of clouds.
Santiago remembers his dreams. I don't. I've said this in previous posts--dreams evaporate for me almost as soon as I have shaken off the last vestiges of sleep from my body. As soon as my feet hit the floor in the morning, anything that my unconscious has placed on the movie screen of my eyelids has faded into the realm of the forgotten or lost. My dreams sit next to a pile of mismatched socks, never to be seen or heard again.
I have only had one recurring dream in my entire life. A strange montage of travelling down an unknown highway in a large empty van with no driver. Everything echoing like I'm underwater. Not a boogeyman or ghost or demented clown in sight. That's it. I stopped having that dream around the time I left my teenage years in the rearview mirror.
That doesn't mean that I never dwell in the dream world. On good days, when I'm working on a poem and it's going really well, it often feels as though I'm in some unconscious place of image. Association and metaphor come easily, and I see things like schools of mating porpoises or a pride of golden lions on a beach. Those kinds of things don't come from the part of me that teaches composition or files reports. They are the stuff of dreams.
As a poet, I am in the dream business all the time. It's who I am and what feeds the hungry side of my spirit. Well, that and Lucky Charms. Maybe that's why I don't recall my nocturnal dreams so easily. I store them up for when I sit down to write a poem. Then, my mind opens up, and all the dolphins and driverless vans and winged Holsteins jump, drive, and fly onto the page.
Saint Marty recall his dreams when they are needed.
And another Lenten poem . . .
The Perfect Poem
by: Martin Achatz
I dream I write the perfect poem,
See it before me, read the words
In a coffee house, before a crowd
Of movie stars, writers, saints.
John Wayne, front and center,
Looks confused but moved,
The way he appeared when he won
His Oscar, stammering like a schoolboy
Asking for a slow dance.
I read. They listen.
Dante sits next to Duke, clothes
Still suffused with faint sulfur.
The great poet glows as I speak,
As if he has finally found
Beatrice, touched the face of love.
I read. They listen.
In his mitre, Saint Isidore,
Patron of the Internet, floats
Between open bar and snack table,
iPhone in hand, blogs, tweets
About my poem to his heavenly
Followers: seraphs, cherubs, martyrs,
Some rebel demons, the Big Three.
Father. Son. Holy Ghost.
Princess Di shares couch, spumante
With Anne Boleyn. Wordsworth sniffs
A vase of daffodils. They all listen
To my perfect poem. Three pages long.
Lines fall like maple leaves
In October, grace, color, drift, plunge.
Image as pure as penguin down,
Full of snow, sun, glacier, ocean.
When I finish, the room rises
In ovation, air a riot of rose petals.
I keep my eyes on the pages,
Commit syllables to memory.
When I wake, I grab pen, journal,
Scribble ten minutes, transcribe perfection.
This morning, I read what I have written:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Pages and pages and pages.
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