Richard Michael Levine
(USA)
Fetal Dreams
Perhaps their dreams are blurred abstractions
A Pollock-like web of angry actions
Turning, in deeper sleep, to a Rothkovian raft
Of somber yellow to float on until they’re
Rescued by the riverbank.
Soon their dreams become semi-abstractions
Like Miro’s flying kites and paddling
Paramecia, each with a few stray
Hairs, an eye (never two) and something
That will soon become, I suppose, a nose.
Or maybe Freud was only half wrong
And infants long to be roped
Inside their mothers’ wombs
(Fathers being too irrelevant to kill)
Dressed in see-through silken robes
Rocking in a snug and food-filled world
Of water exactly as salty as the tears
They shed after dreaming of the tadpoles,
Newts and toads they once were.
Who knows why they cry.
Babies may have nightmares, too,
Including this recurrent one: It’s a warm
And endless night, lapped by soothing
Sounds, when suddenly all hell
Breaks loose, an epic flood
Followed by world-ending seizures
And howls to rouse the sleeping dead,
A backwards plunge in a vise-like grip
Through a dark tunnel
Toward a blinding light.
Or could it be that at birth
Babies dream their whole futures
In images that flash before their unseeing eyes?
A red tricycle, say, before a trellised
Wall, or a chocolate cake with lights on top.
Doing the cha-cha with grandma, perhaps,
Or a black cap flying toward a blue sky
A white bouquet caught mid-air
A lock of hair in a velour box
A car, a boat, a colonnaded house
A chaise longue on a lazy lawn
A tiny casket lowered into earth
Or a snowy scene inside a globe of glass
An ancient swaybacked collie on a couch
A face glimpsed once and never lost.
Only the last one seems familiar:
A hairless, shriveled being tethered
To food and water is seen dreaming
The same dream in reverse.
The baby screams on waking to a life.
First published in Ambush Review 2012
Peek-a-Boo
At two he likes to crawl
Under people’s sweaters
And stare out at the woven room
Womb-warm in muffled expectancy
Between dreaming and being awake
Disappearing and being seen
Wiggling his legs to draw you
To his secret place saying
“Peek-a-boo, I see you”
While he giggles and giggles.
I too like to sit
In cafes in mid-winter
Where the warmth of gathered bodies
Mists the windows over
And people talk to one another
Or stare at their phones
Luring them to ring-a-ding
So they can shout “I’m here, I’m here”
As I peek at them while reading
Needing to be found out.
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Before turning to fiction and poetry, Richard Michael Levine was a magazine writer and editor for many years, publishing feature articles in Harper’s, Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, New York, Rolling Stone and many others. He also taught magazine journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. His non-fiction book Bad Blood: A Family Murder in Marin County, published by Random House and NAL, was a bestseller. He has published poetry in several literary magazines and is now seeking a publisher for his short story collection, The Man Who Gave Away His Organs.