Excerpt from As for Dream

SOMEONE ELSE

I was glad to make love to him not for the pleasure so much
as the pressure on my stomach to help me forget
the weight of what slept there.


LISTEN

The flies are hovering over the barley,
a storm is pressing its way here, swallows are flying low.
His talk is shitty air itching your ear.
You just need some penicillin.
You just need one phrase to say over and over
to get him out from inside of you.


ANOTHER STUPID PARTY

I had to stand at the other end of the room
and talk to a hundred other people.

My longing for him trailed after
my body and although its nature had not
changed, its agency had,

as if it were an angel whispering at the back of my head
and I know, if I turned, that on the floor behind me
we held each other, we kept insisting, always
working towards the end of the story,

his breath on me the weight of the dream I had
in which I kissed him and felt a skittish
animal slip into me.

Tomorrow I'm going to do something about it.


AT EIGHTY-ONE

On the anniversary of your death
I did very little-worked in the garden,
had a glass of sherry at lunch-time with some crackers,
put on a cassette tape, and sat very still.
I wondered then if I was sad. No, not really.
And all at once I felt heat rushing through
me. I recognized you.


AT EIGHTY-FOUR

She noticed that her daughters felt like children, some days,
visiting. She wanted to say it was too late--;
the work of this lifetime and the next weigh the same.

But waking from the dream was making room for death.
It needed its own space.

Which is death, the next
life, or the dream?

IN THE GARDEN

We walked into the back garden. She took the shears from her basket and cut the sapling branches draped over the bench. She sat then with her hands crossed in her lap and looked at the tree above us, which was thinning and sickly.

When her sister was dying of tuberculosis she would read her letters on the balcony away from the children and then burn them. They were wrapped in layers of paper and sent from her mother, who wrote on the envelopes, "Enclosed is a letter from Anna."

Her sister, she said, fell in love with the doctor during the last years of her life. He helped her move into a little cottage on the grounds of the sanitarium, and she would lie all day in bed, in nightgowns that she embroidered very beautifully, and sew dresses for the children (which had to be cooked in a kind of oven before they were sent, so they were ruined) and write letters. Once the children came and were allowed to wave at her from the garden. This was one year before the war.

She often found she was in a long tunnel, walking in one direction or the other but reaching neither destination. One day she resigned from her ambition to be a poet and the dream ended. She continued to write letters. It had been a decision about form.

She was not able to work as long in the garden as she used to, but it was August, which meant that soon her daughter would come and they would pack up the house. The roses luxuriated. She renamed one bush Madame de Récamier.

Copyright 2001 by Saskia Hamilton. All rights reserved.