In Dreams

After eighteen years there’s no real grief left   

for the man who was my father.

I hardly think of him anymore,

and those dreams I used to have,

in which he’d be standing in a room of people   

I didn’t know—maybe his new friends,   

if the dead have friendships—

those dreams no longer trouble my sleep.

He’s not in the crooked houses I wander through   

or in the field by the highway

where I’m running, chasing down

some important piece of paper,

desperate to reach it

as it’s lifted in the wake of trucks

or flattened and marked by passing cars,   

as it’s lifted again to swirl over

a broken wood fence. I don’t know why   

the paper’s so important, or if anything

is even written there.

I don’t know where the dead go,

or why it’s good to forget them,

not to see them if they come crowding

the windows or trying to lay themselves down   

and press along our bodies at night

and ask that we love them again,

that our sorrows include them once more.   

This morning I couldn’t get up.

I slept late, I dreamed of the single

sheet of paper, which I never managed to reach   

as it stuttered and soared over the grass

and a few flowers, so that I woke

with a sense of loss, wondering who

or what I had to mourn besides

my father, whom I no longer mourn,   

father buried in the earth beneath grass,   

beneath flowers I trample as I run.

 

--Kim Addonizio