Like Deer

I am jogging with George.

We are running along a country lane.

We don’t talk. He is slightly

ahead. There is a hedge

on the left. I feel like he wants

to go that way. I might want

to go that way, too. He turns

left, right into and through

the hedge, which is velvety

and dense like a dream. Maybe

it will work for me. I turn. It is

thick and sticks to me

like flesh. I emerge slowly,

can barely move, have hedge

all over me like caterpillar

fur or armor or a new layer

of me. George is moving well ahead

up a path between the lawns

of two old properties. He is

nearing the trees. With effort

I pull off a few clumps.

My stride and breathing loosen.

I catch up and we run

blithely through the woods.

Her Embrace

Went to the old apartment on Bedford.

It was gutted on the inside.

Walls torn out. New beams put in

in the basement. I used the old keys.

She comes in. I say something. She runs away.

I have to explain myself to myself

and leave. Across the street is the diner

everyone goes to. I am sure to see

the people I met earlier there. Or is it

a cemetery? I come to the town square

and start driving around it. The huge trees

on the green hang over the road.

She is on the green. I see her from

the side. She is on her way, striding even,

under the trees. This time when I go

around the square the car is out of control,

starts to slide off the road into the dark,

snow-covered arms of the trees.

I dreamt that I entered a large living room where many of my relatives were sitting.  My cousin Eve Lyman told me that her late father, Uncle Abe Chayes, was in an adjacent room, and that I should go and talk with him.  I entered the room, a very large room with a cathedral ceiling.  Uncle Abe was supposedly sitting on the couch in the middle of the room.  But it wasn’t Uncle Abe.  It was my long-dead father.  I asked Dad a question, and he said that the key to politics in this town was bowling.  If you could bowl high numbers in the bowling league (a fact that I had slightly forgotten about Dad), people would do anything for you.  Dad started to make a further point and stopped mid-sentence, like a jukebox that had run out of money.  He wasn’t allowed to continue, or wasn't able to continue.  It was very disturbing.

*

I dreamt that I had blown off my courses for most of a semester.  I was walking around the upper floors of a huge high school looking for my classes.  There was something Victorian or Gothic or both about the building.  I poked my head into a cavernous math classroom.  I couldn’t figure out where the class was in the textbook.  I couldn’t follow anything.  I continued down a hall and turned a corner, and saw another one of my classes through a glass wall.  I entered.  But they were having a little reception, drinks and pastries, and I had no real right to join them, and it wouldn’t help me catch up from being so far behind.  I went looking for another class.  It was supposed to be on the top floor as well, but you couldn’t access that area from where I was.  I took an elevator down to the first floor.  Looking for a way to get to the other part of the top floor, I wandered into two first-floor rooms, which were actually art galleries and apartments belonging to two young men.  It was surprising to find apartments in the school.  I stepped outside in front of the school, which looked like the front of my old high school, Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J.  I looked up at the roof to see if I could figure out where this other classroom was.  Indeed, there were these glassed-in sections that bloomed on parts of the roof.  Now, I had to figure out where the elevator was that would get me to the correct glassed-in section.

*

I dreamt that we were leaving a vacation spot in Maine where we had shared a house with another family.  Their baby was sleeping in the big back room.  Someone had awakened it.  Maybe me.  And the mother had puts notes all over the place, warning people not to wake the baby.  What should we do today with the little time we had left?  Where hadn’t we gone?  Schoodic Point.  The rocky coast right nearby.  We decided on the rocky coast.  Before that, we stopped at an ancient church.  As we left, someone wondered if the church’s ancient objects would be distributed to the other German churches in town, where they had been originally located.  I said this church had a special status and could keep all the objects. A local sitting near the exit agreed.  We both agreed it was nice the church was so ancient, though I added it would be better if it were even more ancient, truly ancient, say, built in 600 A.D.  I crowded into the other family’s car, which was parked very near a red car.  As our friend gunned out of the parking lot, he scraped the red car.  He wasn’t aware of it, but I could see the people in that car were.  The car followed us, making a big turn on someone’s lawn.  The car turned into a frightening power-company or phone-company vehicle.  It could do a lot of damage to us.  But it headed down a street with low overhanging wires, which it could never get through.  We ultimately parked somewhere and I cleaned all of our stuff out of the back of their car.  They were heading back to Cambridge, even though it had snowed a lot there.  Before they left, I ran back to the car and shook the guy’s hand and said, “Great spending time with you, let’s do it again.”  I was glad I hadn’t forgotten to do that.