You can go home again despite what the author said but home won’t be home anymore so perhaps the author was right. It used to be a little used beltway strangling the already small downtown, a sunken dream of some city planner with myopia. Now they have filled that in and lined it with apartments; here an array of identical, stacked boxes, the blocks of an eight-year-old architect who has discovered order, and there uneven stacks sitting askew fashioned by the less nimble hands of a three-year-old architect perhaps, but all bearing the same name Now Leasing, which I suppose would be an interesting name if this small city wanted to change from the name it has had forever and a day.
I’m guessing it was about 2 AM, I can’t be sure since the only clock in the bedroom was analog and unlighted, visible only by day.
I don’t know what woke me, it just seems to happen, but the moon was peering in between the slats of closed window blinds.
I don’t like being watched in my sleep, certainly not by some voyeuristic interloper but there she was and it was clear there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it, and we both knew it.
On the mesa she might be accompanied by a coyote, but here she traveled solo always seeming to want to watch as my dreams unfurled across the screen, and Luna simply didn’t want to miss this night’s show.
There was a ghost or two for a short while, that lived under my bed when I was three or four.
My mother said they were not real, she couldn’t see them when she looked, so they were all in my mind.
I had to tell her that you don’t ever actually see ghosts, you just know they are there because you sense their presence.
Mother’s ghost visited me last night in my dreams, but I reminded her that she didn’t believe ghosts exist, and returned to the dream she interrupted and she . . . oh I don’t know what she did, but she wasn’t there and I suspect will not return, which is entirely fine by me.
In my dream last night I was moving a matress, queen sized, probably with box springs but it was wrapped, from my parents’ home to my apartment, but not using a vehicle, just pushing it along the streets, obeying all the traffic signals, using my turn indicators, although don’t ask why a mattress had turn lights, just accept that it did. It was arduous work, and I hoped I’d soon get to the hill that led down to my apartment, for it would make the end of the journey easier by far. Unfortunately I never did get there, I woke up first wondering what the dream meant. So if you can help me, I would greatly appreciate your insights, and you should definitely know it was a Serta Perfect Sleeper for I’m sure that makes a difference.
As a teenager, like so many others of our narrow minded, obsessed gender, I imagined myself a great lothario, girls on the edge of womanhood lining up for my attention.
The absurdity of that dream was lost on me and my peers, testosterone drowning it in a sea of hormones, and we were oblivious to the real obstacle always right in front of us, that we imagined love and sex in the first person only.
Now that youth and even middle age are behind me I still try to recall when I realized that love requires the second person singular, and my pleasure is complete only when my partner’s is as well.
We sat in the cramped kitchen huddled around the stove the open oven door spreading a faint warmth that barely slid through the winter chill. The bare bulb in the ceiling strained and flickered fighting to hold as the generators were shut down, and darkness enveloped our small world. The sky was lit by the flares and the odor of exploding shells seeped through the towel sealed windows covered in the tattered bedsheets too thin to afford warmth. Ibrahim had been gone two weeks sneaking out of the city to join his brothers in Gorazde or Tuzla, or wherever it was that they were struggling to save what little was left. We huddled under the small table and dreamed of the taste of fresh bread, or even pork. In the morning he would run among the craters in the streets in search of the convoy and the handouts, which we would raven as the sun set over our war torn hell.
First published in Legal Studies Forum, Vol. XXX, No. 1 & 2, 2006
In my dreams I wandered the alleys of Lisbon searching for a familiar face, and many came close, but no man stopped me and asked if I was, by chance his son, for he dreamed I was what a son of his would look like.
Now I have no need to wander for I know he is in a military cemetery in Burlington, New Jersey, and I doubt he had any idea in life he had another son, or a daughter in Italy, for weekends were quickly passed when you had to be back at the base by midnight on Sunday.
Stevie and I were probably eight sitting on the front stoop of our flat, he the only one in third grade smaller than me. There was no snow to be seen, none in the sky, none on the frozen and still patchy lawn, just the wind of an always cold December day. Christmas is coming, I said aren’t you excited, with all the gifts. Stevie smiled, they’re always great but maybe this year I’ll finally meet Santa. I laughed, lacking the heart to shatter an infantile dream. Do you buy into the sled and reindeer thing, or does he come more by way of magic. Of course it’s the sled, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had some pretty good jet engines. And you think he comes down the chimney I asked. We don’t have one, you know that so he must use a back window, the one where I broke the lock last summer when we were spies. He looked momentarily sad, you don’t have anything like Santa, although you get lots of neat gifts, just not all at once. At least eight, most years more but you’re right we have no Santa, but we have something even better. Better how, what could be better? Each year at Passover, Elijah comes in during our Seder I don’t see him but we have to open the door for him during dinner. Does he bring you anything? He’s not like that, he just comes all old and bearded, and before you can even see him he’s gone again, probably next door at the Goldstein’s or maybe with Larry Finkel, though his mom can’t cook very well. So what’s he do, this Elijah? Not much, I admitted, but he does have a drinking problem.
First Published in Friends & Friendship Vol. 1, The Poet, 2021
The ghosts of my birth parents blow into my dreams as so many white sheets torn from the clothesline by gale winds, fly over me, at once angels and vultures carrying off memories created from the clay of surmise and wishful thinking.
I invite their visits, frail branches to which to cling in the storms of growing age, beginnings tenuous anchors to hold against time, knowing the battle cannot be won, but take joy in skirmishes not to be diminished by an ultimate failure I have long come to accept.
an old writer and his words 