Freud
by: Billy Collins
I think I
know what he would say
about the dream I had last night
in which my nose was lopped off in a sword fight,
leaving me to wander the streets of 18th-century Paris
with a kind of hideous blowhole in the middle of my face.
But what would be his thoughts
about the small brown leather cone
attached to my face with goose grease
which I purchased from a gnome-like sales clerk
at a little shop called House of a Thousand Noses?
And how would he interpret
my stopping before every gilded mirror
to admire the fine grain and the tiny brass studs,
always turning to show my best profile,
my clean-shaven chin slightly raised?
Surely, narcissism fails to capture
my love of posing in those many rooms,
sometimes with an open window behind me
showing the blue sky which would be eclipsed
by the Eiffel Tower in roughly a hundred years.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I never remember my dreams. They're gone almost as soon as I open my eyes. Good or bad, dreams simply don't stick with me. I tried keeping a dream journal once. However, I never turned on a light to scribble in my journal in the middle of the night or early morning. Just not motivated enough, I guess.
That doesn't mean I don't have dreams. Of course, I do. Not about having my nose lopped off in a sword fight. Or wearing a leather cone over the blowhole of my missing schnoz. I wish I could say that my dreams are filled with Pulitzer or Nobel Prizes. Or Donald Trump handcuffed, sporting prison orange. Or Bigfoot knocking on my front door to pose for some selfies with me.
Usually, by the time I finally fall asleep at night, I'm so exhausted that I don't even remember falling asleep. The next thing I know, sunlight is streaming through my bedroom curtains and it's time to face another day. As most of my loyal disciples know, I'm sort of a night owl, so it takes a while for sleep to catch me. When it does, it hits me over the head with a sledgehammer.
It was another hot day. Almost ninety degrees with humidity that made breathing feel like inhaling water. At work, I painted walls and ceilings. There's a big reorganization happening at the library, and I was lending a hand with the prep. So, from about 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., I was on a ladder with a paint roller in my hand.
In the afternoon, I wrote in a bayou for a couple hours. It was part of an event that celebrated sacred green spaces and the generation of art. It was beautiful to sit in that place, surrounded by cattails and bugs and tamaracks and jewelweed. One of the other artists saw a deer. The biggest creature I saw was the mosquito that bit my arm. I was sharing a spot with one of my best poet friends and mentors. I got a new poem out of the experience. (See below.)
And now, Saint Marty's feet and arms are sore, his shoulders are a little sunburned, and it's almost midnight. Not a dream in sight.
Swamp Music
by: Martin Achatz
Swamps keep you humble,
remind you how tall tamaracks
can grow, how there are universes
of grass and fern and jewelweed
all around us with constellations
that buzz and trill and croak. Medieval
astronomers believed planets sang
in the black swamp of space, music so
beautiful only saints and angels could
hear it. If you pause in a swamp, quiet
your tumbled mind, you may still
catch this cosmic chorale without
need for being pure as whole milk.
Just pay attention to each leaf, every
mosquito that lights on your arm,
all the bird song, insect song, grass song.
Perhaps that's what those old
white guys really heard so long ago. Not
a Mars and Jupiter duet. Rather, nuthatches
in white pines, sap humming through
veins of alder, the lullaby of dirt and water
beneath their calloused soles. They heard
that, believed nothing on earth could
make such beauty. As I sit now
in the middle of this bayou, I know
how tiny I am, a thing that will eventually
become part of this green symphony once
again, my body feeding its hungry musicians
as they stretch and grow and tune.
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