Dawn McGuire
(USA)
Interpretation of Dreams
Occasionally we still dream each other’s dreams.
Our subtle bodies touch, and trade of mysteries
while Night lingers in a tux on deck,
the ice in his glass throwing spangles of light everywhere.
He trades his red sash for a kiss from a girl
and she undresses him
and girds the Earth round with red.
So it begins, Morning,
while Night, forever on the make,
is recovering his wooing clothes
to drink again and slip
the drunken deathless longings
to his bastard children down below.
The Chief’s Dreams Ending
We are a blessed people.
The first offspring of the feast years
already walk beside their mothers,
and their long, straight bones
make travelers take them for the children
of the Western race.
When the mother’s belly is satisfied
she makes her children beautiful with love,
teaching them things useless
except in the days of fullness.
But today I touched the clear eyes of my children
as if I could turn them forever
towards their tender, useless secrets.
For in the night I twisted like a snake
beneath the Goat God’s hoof:
a night without dreams,
the first such in seven years.
How late the Sun came
to lift me from my bed,
and I lay stricken,
not by vision
but by its absence.
Goat-headed God, do not deceive me.
If my dreams have taken enemies
put the sword in my hand yourself.
But first press its sharp side
to the soft part of my palm
so that I know, by bite of pain,
what this day requires.
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Cantar que vaya al alma de las cosas
y al alma de los vientos
y que descanse al fin en la alegría
del corazón eterno.
— Federico García Lorca
Cantar que Vaya
The way
the Everyday
expects us
to go on and on
so quietly,
soullessly,
like the little dog
tied to a tree
who finally
stops barking—
Alma de los vientes,
carry García Lorca
back to us,
that his slender
fingertips
may slip
through
the ligatures,
the ones
that silence us
Dreams of a World Series, San Francisco, 2012
1. Light from 668 fixtures, temperature sixty-two degrees. The crowd has been loud all
night.
Morning, the slightly injured will report their slights to the clinic, where the receptionist will not take home a living wage and will be rude. In Grayson, 2,488 miles away, there’s no excuse for rudeness. Fifty-four percent of the people (~652) will disappear into the homoerotic ads for Budweiser. They’ll eat everything white and buy the baby monitor as seen on TV.
Pale, triggered, vaso-constricted, the new Bayer migraine medicine may not be enough.
Grow where you’re planted is sort of what Voltaire said. Rusty French. I do somehow
remember that West is never where the twain shall meet. Will any Easterners, speak up?
2. The man in the Moon is mute but his acne scars say touch.
Full prayer involves a nakedness not even the skin can cover.
The loss is suffered.
But you run the bases with a lot of emotion anyway, whatever it is you saw— the armed robbery, the petty predation, the caseload with no-one on top, the fracking engineers walking the grid, the dead man in your yard—because there is also some relief. The person who was secretly plotting to blackmail you moved to Caracas. Two Buds at the game yet spared the humiliation of a DUI. (You were perfectly frank and nobody made you afraid, not even Colonel Mustard).
3. Thursday also was a good day. You got away with a double negative. At the reunion dinner,
no one used the right fork. Back home, the circumstances weren’t even mysterious.
An instant replay put your mind at ease.
Where is the Lion’s Club, the Elks, the Veterans of Foreign Wars
is not a helpful question.
If you want to kill yourself when you stop smoking,
don’t take the Chantix.
4. It really is up to you and me. Yes, I am lonely. But I believe it’s self-imposed.
Where is the host and why have we been brought here
is not a helpful question.
« In my opinion » doesn’t mean what it seems. I secretly enjoy being wrong.
You? You said you were on the case since day one.
We can’t help being wired for hubris.
I’ll breathe in your suffering and, always the optimist, you might breathe in mine. Next time: when a day belongs to you, even if it’s noon, shout out
Rise sun.
Signing the Papers
The shimmering aspens wave you over
on Highway 4. At Angel’s Camp
ghosts rising off hot asphalt
pretend to be bent light
It’s all unstable air
The psalm is my shepherd
The hasp on the locket is broken
All that silver, all that gold
The gold of no replacement
The silver of wishing
Acceptance is
torn tin
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Brain at Dusk
Dusk falls like a minor third,
the interval of regret.
The backyard is hung with
speechless sheets,
not dry, not wet.
Wind lifts them up and lets them fall.
It is not night, not day,
but a mute third thing, tense
with emptiness. Anyway,
go make dinner.
Fruits, meats, leafy green
regrettables, raw or cooked.
It’s 6 pm. This time of day
my father is always twelve.
Earlier he sneaked away
from his shift at the brickyard
to go to school
As usual, he comes home
to a whipping.
As usual, I can’t do anything
from here.
Night arrives with bruises
and the complicating stars.
My father becomes
an educated man
who shouts in his sleep.
He never raises his hand
in anger; teaches a daughter
to name the constellations.
In the dream, they start with Orion,
who cleared the beasts off Chios,
and whom Aurora loved—
Dear Neocortex:
Gripped, tight as a fist,
around your diamond sky,
why talk empty-handed?
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Black Gold
…in the friction between two words
worlds will be lost
(misquoted from Sohrab Sepheri)
Who belongs to whom,
is not so much a question
as a kind of hair
to be yanked off in anger,– fistsful
of street-fight tumbleweed
roiling towards the 3rd street grate—
or to be rubbed smooth with oils
by a lover, or brushed by a good father,
or dressed up in tribes and packs,
affinity groups, announcements of worth,
or brushed out in chemo clumps,
or left on the pillow after night terrors,
or brittle-split by bad water, or turned white
overnight when the Messenger comes in a dream.
Or cut off as a sign.
In South India, women shave their heads
for Govinda; 70,000 tons of hair a year
swept into gunny sacks for China.
The temple gets a hundred dollars a pound.
China sells the hair to Hollywood
for wigs called « Darling » and « Brandy ».
The women never know.
Would it matter?
Words, worlds apart:
eternal, commercial,
trapped like women
on either side of a garden wall,
one bald, the other a disaffected
blonde wearing a wig called « The Duchess. »
Both tip their faces towards the sun.
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Dawn McGuire is a neurologist and award-winning author of The Aphasia Café (IFSF Publishers, San Francisco, 2012) two other poetry collections, Sleeping in Africa and Hands On. She grew up in the hills of Appalachia and was educated at Princeton University, Union Theological Seminary, and the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. Her poems have appeared in various literary magazines, anthologies, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the Journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Most recently, she was co-winner of the 2011 Sarah Lawrence/Campbell Corner Language Exchange Poetry Prize, awarded for “poems that treat larger themes with lyric intensity.” She is Professor of Neurology at the Neurosciences Institute of Morehouse School of Medicine, where her research focuses on minority health disparities in stroke and dementia. She divides her time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Atlanta, Georgia.
http://www.ifsfpublishing.com/dawn-mcguire/