My Father Had a Soft Way of Viewing the World

My father had a soft way of viewing the world.
The landscape would lie gently upon his eye.
Tenderly, he rubbed the feet of newborns.
Delicately, he glued broken Christmas ornaments.
Sympathetically, he listened to Erik Satie
patiently spell out feeling, piano key by key.
He was a sensitive man, people said,
and I always knew.
But I also saw what the world did not,
the severe anger,
older than he or I,
that resided somewhere
between the ribs and the spine.

Ghost Dance

Rays of sunlight
stretch and lie
out across the grass
like children avoiding chores.

So where is Wovoka,
my father?
Teach me how to Ghost Dance
this fall before the spring.
I don’t care much for the hunt
or farming
so teach me how to dance
for peace and salvation
for when
the grass is high.
I’m old enough to learn.

The sunlight
stretches out across the grass
lying around and rolling about
like a child avoiding chores.
This winter
all the men will be buried
quiet under the new fresh soil
and next spring
the sweet grass
and streams
and trees
and dreams
and buffalo will return.

And all the children
will lie in the tall grass
and laugh
as they roll about
in circles
bellies full
avoiding chores.

And all who dance the Ghost Dance
will be taken up into the air
and suspended there
replaced by the young
lying in the sun
rolling about in the tall grass
playing with shadows
and dreaming dreams.

You As a Symbol

“Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that
we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom?” -Tench
Coxe

“Omne ignotum pro magnificao….whatever is unknown is held to be
magnificent."




I dreamed about you last night.
It wasn’t the first time,
and even when it was the first time,
I didn’t make anything of it
for its randomness made perfect sense,
or the only sense of nonsense
that I will allow my dreams to be.

But when you reappeared again
and again last night,
I now find myself having to admit
that you are a symbol
of something.
A something that feel certain I knew last night,
but seem to have chosen to forget.

I know I dream constantly in sleep
but some secret promise
I must have made to myself
is that I now blatantly refuse to recall my dreams in any wholeness
or meaning or light.
The reasons for it could be many.
First of all, dreaming proved to me how unimaginative I was –
my dreams merely became my stories;
therefore, I couldn’t take credit for anything.
Being too selfish to admit this,
I instead chose to become Unaware.
Unimaginative followed suit.

The more likely reason, though, is that
during the last few years
my dark dreams became progressively more
and too real,
too frequent to tolerate,
and then, when most raw and open,
in the most wonderful senses of the words
with the birth of my daughter,
I ironically found myself nightly plagued with the terrors of torture
about which I could do nothing
but cower and watch –
or worse,
unintentionally cause,
like slipping uncontrollably on mud in a truck
and crushing over laid out wounded soldiers.
Every night so much death,
so many mutilated men,
and everything felt like fact when I awoke.

So I suppose I made a pact with myself:
you may dream
as long as you forget.

But I do remember that I have been dreaming well lately
and, in at least a few instances,
dreaming of you -
which is further strange because we’ve never met.

Though I can’t remember you,
I feel that if I met you as a child
I would have loved you
openly,
though probably not obviously,
or at least I never would have made you aware
of the wideness of my heart.

The truth is I know somewhere inside of me
what these dreams,
what this childlike love,
is supposed to represent,
but I don’t want to remember
because, though it is simple and innocent,
it can and will
get misconstrued by me, by you, by others.

Still it is so nice knowing you intimately
without sight or touch:
knowing that you are good
and believing that you find me worthwhile
to spend time with every so often,
to share with me the things you think
without the complications of intention or strife.

I don’t know how it feels except to say
that when I wake
it feels like we are defeating the death
bad dreams are made of.

As a result, I have had fleeting moments of silly today
where I wonder who people dream of
and whether people dream of each other simultaneously.
I also have had sad moments
where I wonder if my daughter has nightmares
of frightening shadows
that she has never really seen before.
But I wonder too if she can read my mind,
and why she appears to telepathically know
when I soundlessly
watch her sitting in her crib
talking to a picture of Pinocchio
through the most microscopic crack in the door.
At these moments she will knowingly turn and smile directly at me,
as though I called to her
knowing before I do
what my next move should be.

Today I also questioned whether love in heaven -
if there is a heaven -
is even remotely close to what we make it in waking life.
And, though I don’t believe in “heaven,”
I do believe that I should teach my daughter that It exists,
even for those you’ve never met,

for,
if dreams serve to teach us anything,
I feel
that you -
as a symbol -
are certainly a symbol
of that.

Child Development

by Billy Collins


As sure as prehistoric fish grew legs
and sauntered off the beaches into forests
working up some irregular verbs for their
first conversation, so three-year-old children
enter the phase of name-calling.

Every day a new one arrives and is added
to the repertoire. You Dumb Goopyhead,
You Big Sewerface, You Poop-on-the-Floor
(a kind of Navaho ring to that one)
they yell from knee level, their little mugs
flushed with challenge.
Nothing Samuel Johnson would bother tossing out
in a pub, but then the toddlers are not trying
to devastate some fatuous Enlightenment hack.

They are just tormenting their fellow squirts
or going after the attention of the giants
way up there with their cocktails and bad breath
talking baritone nonsense to other giants,
waiting to call them names after thanking
them for the lovely party and hearing the door close.

The mature save their hothead invective
for things: an errant hammer, tire chains,
or receding trains missed by seconds,
though they know in their adult hearts,
even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed
for his appalling behavior,
that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,
their wives are Dopey Dopeheads
and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants.

Death Wish

My death was a glorious place.
It’s a shame I can’t rush to get to it any longer,
but I’ve got things to do.

My death was a home,
a nice place to curl up and read a book.
It had a fireplace, but you never had to turn it on.
It was perpetual fall outside,
and the room’s window was large,
picturesque,
and easy to open.

Sometimes I would roam outside
among you,
a whistling specter,
enjoying the fresh air
and foliage

and occasionally
I would
pat you on the ass
for fun.

The Pied Piper’s Wife, the Painter

My husband is Peter the Piper.
Finer man I could not chose.
Though most of the time
he’s off with the mice,
he’s not a man I’ll lose.

And he caught me
with the same sad tune
about a year and a half ago.
At first the song
was one I could dance to
and then it grew soft and low.

For Peter’s a man
who will play his whistles
until you follow him home.
And the time when I left
he ran from the music,
chased me
and carried me home.

The mice can’t get enough of him
with his whistles so soft and low.
But since no one but me
has heard him speak
there’s plenty they’ll never know.

I have married the musician.
He is an artist’s dream.
And this evening while he’s off with the mice
I’ll paint pictures he’ll never see.

European Vacation

Trapped in a car on the wrong hand side
with a woman he thought he knew.
She was a good woman,
though one often testy,
but on this day
his patience was through.

She had planned to drive them
from Dublin to Cork
in three hours and a half,
but realizing she’d left
their vouchers in Dublin
they had to drive all the way back.

“How long before we turn out the light?”
she asked that night at the B&B.
“Well, it doesn’t much matter
to me anyway,
in honesty,” said he.

“What do you mean?
It doesn’t matter?
Time is running out.
We have bills to pay,
meals to eat,
hundreds of miles,
thousands of feet
to cover before
we’re in it knee deep.
Now when do we wake,
and when do we sleep?”

And he said, “Sleep
when you must.
Time’s what we keep
or what we should lose
or when we should sleep.
So turn out the light
or just let it be.
For if you can’t let go now
then you won’t let go then.
So why not let us go
back off to bed?
And if the thorn of a rose
is the thorn in your side,
then you’re better off dead,
if you haven’t yet died.”

And then he suddenly
started to cry,
and she held him there,
and she turned out the light.