ManicDDaily

Dream Morning

The  lawn mowed professionally of late, I notice
how robins, who I always thought bobbed (as in,
hopped), actually walk with the quick two-step
of a keystone cop, or a migrant
from Benny HIll.

Only now I see—the short grass shows all—that this morning’s robin
also hops.

I wonder then if anyone knows the reason
why robins sometimes hop and sometimes walk,
and whether, if I watched them for a long time—probably years—I’d understand it—

Or maybe robins just sometimes likes to hop and other times
to walk, sort of like my dream self last night, when I, in the guise of a young girl, ran away
from a yoga school—it wasn’t a class but a whole
school and an incredibly cliquey place—though first, I went to tell them,
the teachers and all
the hip students,
that they would never
see me again—

As I left, I skipped—
out through an amber hall towards an
emerald night,
until I noticed this other girl (one of the super hip ones)
following, and turned towards her,
so that I had to skip backwards to keep up my
departure.

She’d been sent, ostensibly, out of concern that I would harm myself,
or at the very least, fall
into harm’s way.
Though, of course, there was also an element of control—
the school did not like anyone
to abscond—

But I told her that they didn’t need to worry, that I wasn’t
actually going to leave home, at least not yet,
that I was only
leaving them.
 

In the dream, this announcement was kind of a surprise for me
as well as the other girl,
my declaration inside the yoga school had been
so extreme, so animated
by rejection that I too thought I was skipping away
from all I knew; that I too worried
about coming to
some harm.

Now, a gold finch, actually lemon yellow, darts in a zing
of small bell curves, towards the black-eyed susans, which
are truly golden, also brown-eyed,
and I notice that the robin’s now bobbed elsewhere,
and also, that the leaves of the trees just across
caress the light breeze like fingers assessing
a precious fabric, and I think about breezes
of light, as if the light were flickering through the leaves,
only truly, it’s the leaves themselves that flicker, while the light,
despite its endlessly moving arc, is quite fixed
in the moment.

And I am so happy that things are not always
as they seem and that my dream self
did not leave home, not yet anyway.

******************************************

Another drafty sort of poem!  Have a good week!

This entry was posted on July 24, 2022 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.