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Dreams & Memories
By Dee Wolfe
October 2006
In Solitary
In solitary, chained to the brooding night,
I walked a highway,
Longing for the presence of another's
Sweet self full of musky adolescence,
Dainty soft her ribs unto me swelling
While she trembled with anticipation
Searching for a kiss, my Autumn girl.
Since that time the days had wheeled around
And Spring was come, and high school winding down,
Adulthood like a beast in slow approach now
Looming beyond this Sunday night of hopes.
A jar of home-made vintage sent desire
Deep into my wistful, wandering self,
Romantic under stars that watched upon me
With a cold detachment. Here I was
A kid in love with a kid I'd turned my back to,
Wishing now her arms were wrapped around me,
Walking full five miles in hope to win her,
Cathy, Love, my little flower, Cathy;
Just to say "I don't desire you
So much as I have come to love you as--"
Did I envision marriage, poor but happy
Living in a rental near the lake,
Ourselves beloved with loved and lovely children
Playing on a large and shaded lawn,
And she with me as I with her the same.
Something on her cul-de-sac had altered,
Emptiness where once a human presence
Sat upon the porch to feel the breeze
Of Wasatch evening like a father's blessing;
That I knew her parents' tiny house
Was gone now, razed to stones and powder.
Then the moon, a ghastly yellow phosphor,
Lit the empty lot with toxic light;
That I stood therefore on a lunar landscape
With its shadows all oblique and evil
Where before me lay her room in ruins,
Only the frame of a trundle bed where we,
Amazed to be alive, had touched and kissed.
I Dreamed I Saw My Dad
1.
I dreamed I saw my Father casting high
his bluest line across the
Over aromatic willow sunrise
Glory of cottonwoods in shimmering light
Arrayed through breakfast smoke awake and rising.
Here, the bubbling grease of eggs and bacon,
Foam of Coffee in a ranch-house pot,
Aroused these snoozers in their bags and blankets,
Knuckles to their disbelieving eyes
To see my Dad upon the river, standing.
Alone in silver dawn I saw him fish
the tumbling waters of the northbound Weber,
Arcing high and muscular the gleaming
monofilament while I in slumber
drooped into a dream beside the river.
On a single golden hook he pierced
a blood-red globe of gleaming salmon egg,
And pinched the curling line with a leaden ball
And cast it high above the white rush.
As I sat mesmerized at river's edge,
its tremolo rhythm on my own meander,
In my dream I saw him conquer the Weber,
Dreamed of smiling rainbows hooked and wriggling,
Saw the quivering rod as he cast far
Upriver past the bend of willows,
Where the red ball disappeared in whiteness
Under his directing, sternest gaze.
And with the subtle pull of distance Dad
So slowly now the crank and click of reel,
Fooled the trout by craft, the measured turning
Of his tactic proved their sudden ruin
Flopping on the sand and gravel, gasping.
Then I dreamed he marched into the camp,
A limit of rainbows glistening in the creel,
As fresh as willows in a chilly sunrise,
Pungent, earthy bark of leaning willows;
And my father knelt to the ground to show me
Icy sightless eyes amazed to see
My own amazement, I beside the river,
Drooping forth in deep sleep under shadow
of the brooding High Uinta Mountains.
2.
I moved among the righteous in my carnival
Train of dreams until the whistle blew
At Desolation, crossed where State met
And in the
of aging blue-hairs singing praises unto
God, and there my father naked stood
Receiving judgment in eternal progress
And the manifested crown of godhood
In his holiest expectation.
Now,
Ennobled with the radiance of morning,
Father had became the son-rise to them
As the judges sat all wreathed in smiling;
Frumpy ladies of the choir, tittering,
Girlish and silly, all around him, touching,
Reaching for him beautified in glory;
While the angels led him by the hand
Away to a room adjacent, where they then
Adorned him in the starlight robes of fire.
I, diminished and regretful, sought
An exit out into the waning day,
And wondered where I'd left my wife and children,
Wondered if my home still waited for me
North in Farmington; and saw before me
blurs of unfamiliar faces floating
Over boulevards of strangeness into mazes,
Glint of traffic distantly reflected
As if through a telescopic lens,
A busy scene of trembling midday traffic.
Yet an obstacle to merest hope
It seemed, that I became a standing stick,
A shadow as the sun went down that grew
As street lights nascent in the looming night
Began to glow about the temple streets;
And houses on this hill of Bountiful
Seemed empty and remote to me.
And I,
Reduced to strangeness in the glow of store-fronts,
Penniless among the bright and pretty aisles,
A vagrant in the gospel section staring
At a blur of books that made no sense,
The missionary rite of passage here
Where I had been denied, and found no friends,
Understood finality at last.
So there was nowhere I could go but home,
And home was nowhere I knew how to find it.
Just to see my wife upon our threshold waiting,
Happy children running up to greet me,
Filled me with an urgent need to hurry,
As my hope was not belief, belief
No certainty that I could truly count on
As it was a luxury of gods.
Little of Him I had asked for ever
But this transient joy of wife and children,
Love unearned, a freely taken gift
Of life's renewal down the generations:
"Come to me, my babies, come to me,
Embrace your loving father, grateful for you.
I adore you. I ask nothing of you
But your love, your days lived happily;
And all the love I give I give it freely
Without expectation or condition.
As my heart is in you I belong
To you forever in your stewardship
Of all my dearest memories and hopes."
I walked along the sidewalk far beyond
The Temple doors, beheld the west horizon
Where the Sun, a blot of blood, sank deep
Into the boiling sea of salt and tears,
And went until the sidewalk joined two more,
Bisecting them as one might cleave a girl,
Herself a willing friend conjoined in love.
Instead, two stones between the cleave awaited,
Resting on the lawn, as big as tables,
Which assumed intelligence to taunt me
In the language of the ancient gods:
"Unworthy boy, you've reaped your whirlwind,
And naught for you but merest memory,
Regret for every opportunity
You squandered in your misbegotten quest
for happiness in temporal life and love.
Your pride has flushed you out. Your father shines
While you grow dark and stony like ourselves.
And soon enough you'll perch upon a cliff
and stare across a changing world that rolls
forever on without you."
I replied:
"Damn your deviltry! You'll never get
Inside, you sorry servants of the chasm!
See, the temple doors are barred from you,
and you are trapped within your granite selves,
You wagging fools of Satan in his doom!"
The stones replied: "We serve the Sun and Earth.
We are the very stuff of
So look behind you! See that night has come
And all gone home, the Saints of Bountiful!"
And then I turned and ran back to the Temple
Now oblique and stark in shrouding twilight,
Windows glowing soft with light subdued;
No human presence there for me to see,
No shadows moving through translucent curtains
Nor my father's silhouette to comfort
With his love as he'd gone on, it seemed.
Although I squinted through the wrought-iron rails
To see inside, to reach beyond the rails:
"Oh, Daddy," in my anguish, no one came.
Words, they fell like rocks and sank into
The perfect lawn, and I was less than nothing,
Envied every stupid stone that stood
The Temple walls against the rain and wind
Its exaltation by its willing service.
If the stones believed then why not I?
This secret knowledge born of simple faith,
The very stones were given this embrace
But I had been denied. They sang God's praise
Who knew His ways while I knew nothing.
Hurried I into the gathering darkness,
Down the criss-cross neighborhoods on westward,
Moving under glare of street-lights, headlights,
Slow cars moaning past with stony, silent
Occupants in shadow, who now judged me
As I hurried into emptiness
Of vacant boulevards and leaning buildings,
Sightless, staring out like grinning skulls.
And no soul stirred I knew to say hello,
But faces out of darkness damned me with them,
Ghastliness upon them like a brand.
Devoured by the night I searched without
my father's hand to guide me into warmth
And walked the long road out of
And into brooding
Seemed to stir, where only death awaited.
Then I saw a blackness in the road
A beast, a monstrous canine in the mist
Illuminated under streetlight, lying
Dead upon the center of the road.
And as I neared it seemed to just have died;
Its last breath in the atmosphere arising
Ghostly off its glistening eyes and nose,
Run over, left to wail its broken sorrow
On the unforgiving pavement, lonely
In its last hurrah of heat and breath.
And how I hated then the trap of mind
That held my soul enough to see this doom,
A dog more innocent than I brought down
To agony and death while I lived on
In misery and ignorance.
I wept
To drag aside that beautiful beast to lie
Beside the very road that killed it, yes
The self-same road that took me to my hope
That seemed more distant in proximity,
And which I knew could be my own damnation.
"Brother dog, I pray you'll wait for me,
There's no one else to guide me into light,"
I said, in deepest night a wanderer,
A shadow in the shadows mouthing prayers
Of hope without belief to make them real.
3.
I mocked my dad's religion to his face,
Accused him of cheating, called him a damned fool,
And made him answer every accusation
I could spit out of the slobber of my seething rage.
Why bother with a visit after all this time of absence?
Like the gap one feels of a rotted molar yanked?
Love and anger like a fire flared
As I flung wide the door to see his face
I loved in its inscrutability.
I sneered, and taunted him although he said
"I've come to tell you that I'm moving far
Away from here and doubt that I'll be back.
And nothing more he spoke to me but stood
A helpless man aside in a shaded archway,
In the tunneled darkness while my wife
And kids moved past his uninvited presence.
I saw this and I said "Please, Dad, I'm sorry--"
But he waved a brief goodbye and left,
And I cried "Wait, I want to walk beside you,"
Even as he hurried for the street,
And always well ahead of me although
I moved as quickly as these trembling legs
Would let me, sickly I had been so long.
I sighed to see him move ahead and cried
His name but he seemed not to hear me crying
While the distance grew between ourselves.
Upon West Temple and Ninth South he turned
Eastward toward
Smart along the wide meridian
Beside where traffic waited at the light,
The weekend traffic headed out of town,
Peering through me like a blip of movement
Past them in their withering amusement
While my dad diminished in the East.
I saw him as a point past State that blurred
Among the blotches of a neighborhood,
A place on no map knowable to me,
A mystery of unfamiliar avenues
That wheeled all of a sudden into midnight
So that I was lost among the darkened
Dwellings that betrayed no human presence.
Why must all be deep in sleep, and no one
Roused enough to walk me to my home?
And Dad was nowhere I could ever find him.
I knocked upon one likely door so strange
In its familiarity, the porch light
Out so that the climbing moonlight shone
Through silhouette of dancing leaves and limbs,
The night breeze breathing like a sleeping shade,
And I could swear I knew this place.
I'd seen it
In a dream of my own days to come,
The cheerful home that one day would be mine,
Where friends and family all would laugh together,
Watching as the little children played
That were my own, and I, beloved grandpa
Laughing all my tears with this old Earth
To April rain, and this is true religion.
Long I gazed upon that silent door.
Redwood Roses
1.
I walked through Chesterfield upon dry crust
Of porous earth, and dismal dust that clung,
And ragged honkytonk above the rust
Of engines in the summer heat
Amid the yellow weeds, And oil drenching soil
And dog piss on a back fence
Acrid with the chinese elms,
And sun beat down on clapboard houses,
Heat a withering grimace on the strewn chrome;
Humming window fans, potatoes cooked with onions,
Yowling urchins in their scruffy bare-foot play.
The grownups in the kitchen gathered
At the table dealing pinochle,
Coffee brewing, smoke and cigarettes
And boisterous laughter,
Mom cross-legged at the table,
Psychic with the cards, an incantation muttered,
Dad, pretending to no pretense, knees together
Under the table, wide-eyed at the fickle way
Of the deal, a card aloft with hesitation,
Uncle Ray, his thunder-belly splaying legs,
His brooding beast face on a meaty hand, he studied...
Uncle Fred, my crippled friend, a sunken treasure
In his wheel-chair, eyes aglitter
With the craft of malice, knew the ways.
And while they played I wandered hand to hand
As listless as a day without a breeze
To soothe the burn,
To send the dust of rumbling Redwood Road
Into the fetid dinginess of Granger,
The sticky sweat that clung to Magna in its phosphor vapors,
Sulfur spewing from the pores.
I stumbled hungry through the wretchedness
Of my neglect and went back out into the heat,
To see the neighbors' rock house on the corner,
There to glance inside their fridge,
The arctic radiation from the open door,
A frozen pack of hotdogs, half a jug of milk,
Beer and sandwich makings,
Last night's cold egg salad.
Bobbi caught me and she asked me
Aren't they feeding you at home?
And I said no, they're playing pinochle.
Bobbi, my dear friend,
The mother of my memories I pine for,
You fed me at your table,
And sent me out into the swelter,
There to wander in a dream of rivers
Molten under desert sky,
And I was blessed to move among such friends.
2.
Perhaps my lover for a day would not have known me
But I climbed the cedar fence
Dividing us in
And there I saw her long and lovely legs
A sun-baked brown, her cut-off jeans, her tee-shirt
And her bobbed hair perfect.
Her creamy face and lips they called me over
The fence nor did she mock nor cat-call
But she came and helped me over.
She held my hand, her fingers longer than my own,
Regarded me with smiles as if she'd won a catch.
But how was I a prize, a twelve year pick-nose
With his hair all strewn, bare feet in filth
And holes in the knees,
And not a penny on me, nor the prospect
I could earn one yanking stubborn weeds from dry dirt.
The afternoon all heat and dry grass under
The Chinese elms that stank of old fat women,
She led me to a shady spot behind her house,
A place she knew where no one ever went,
And there her eyes were golden to me,
And she held my hand and did not know my loneliness,
And told me I could kiss her if I wanted,
And her mouth breathed warm the furnace of her body,
And I seemed to see inside the fevered darkness
Of her mystery, vast behind her slender form.
I took her hand and felt the tiny hairs upon her arm,
The delicate bones of her shoulders,
Hairs so tiny on the nape,
I smelled the pleasant fragrance of her animal self
Arising, radiating with the heat
Of the long slow afternoon.
Simply to sit beside her, grateful for
The ageless presence of the goddess she
Was to me then,
I needed nothing else to ride me on
The doom ship of the earth, the glide of years
In endless space
And did not care then if I ate or slept
Or stood before my betters while they took
Account of all my shortcomings.
Here was someone worth the very breath
Beside me in a nest of warm acceptance.
I took her then to meet my family
And they laughed at our frivolity,
And they wagged their tongues about our foolishness.
Goodbye, my Pam, I told her with a long last kiss,
And she is lost to me, and it is forty years gone by.
3.
On a day in spring in 1959,
Aunts and mother, cousins, sister,
Gathered at the house in Chesterfield,
Where Redwood Road, a barren blacktop
Stretched through farm and countryside,
A ribbon all the way to Utah Lake,
Awaited us, the servant of our needs;
And we went roaming into town and none of us suspected.
But aunts and mother laid their plans against us,
That we found ourselves before the dreaded Salt Lake Clinic,
Red brick, ominous down a long walk
Where so many other children lined up panicky and crying.
There inside, the great hall dimly lit and hollow
Reeked of medicine, screaming, crying, threats and chaos,
All in a line, all in a long, long queue,
Where I heard words I'd never heard before,
Mysterious, evoking demons:
Diphtheria, polio, tetanus, measles and rubella,
Every one the sickly stench of ether
And the child lies pale and helpless,
Sinking into weakness, nausea, paralysis and death.
And all the while you hear the screams of anguish,
And you are helpless, helpless while they drag you to it, ever closer,
The cranky nurse who stinks of the sickly ether,
The fat old beast, to wrench your puny arm and yank you
To her silver nail of evil fluids plunged into your shoulder,
Stinging worse than bees, the badge of vaccination,
A needle on a patch of skin, a dozen little holes,
The skin gone purple,
Dazed and aching, crying, wet with sobs
And mad betrayal at your mother,
Hopeless in your resignation,
Out you go into the stern new world
Where anything can happen to you,
Pain is your reward for breathing.
I recall my cousin in his black slacks
Just ahead of me and stomping as the needles took their turn,
Trying to get away from that huge sag of meanness, that gorgon,
Hater of children, who berated him for being small.
Yes, and I was next, I danced and cried for mercy and got none.
Afterward, our mothers pitied us and took the lot
To Snelgroves eastward into Sugarhouse,
Where ice-cream came on double cones,
The crystal globes of soft vanilla, chocolate, strawberry all at once.
The sweet breeze of a Wasatch Spring
Through gaily colored flags which rattled from the roiling road,
A breeze arriving with the scent of French-fries
fresh and salted to my fluttering stomach,
Even more than aching in my muscles hunger tugging,
Longing for a patty, sweet and dripping, hot and aromatic.
On that day, it rained above us parked at Woolworth’s,
Fast and sudden, cool wet rising from the concrete,
All the world around a blur of running rain
While we sat safe and cozy in the backseat
Watching through the great rear window
While the raindrops rattled on the empty street.
My mother wheeled us back to
And drove the brown Bel-Aire through avenues
that stretched forever west and south,
To this same origin of all my places,
hub of a galaxy ever turning,
We took our usual chairs around Aunt Nelda's table
Where the great south window faced the backyard and the cedar fence,
And ate our potted meat sandwiches, our tomato soup,
Sipped our warm green-ade from plastic tumblers,
Watched a universe unfold in her backyard
As tumbling mist and water richly ploughed the dust
Beneath the sky gone turbulent, and turned
Our world into a fragrant drizzle of yard and roadway,
Walk and pavement, drench of concrete in our noses,
Where the neighbor's roses bowed to know such kindness.
Bobby
In heat of July I took the cot
Beneath the dense box-elder by our fence,
And there in my skin beside the dancing flutter
Of a sapling did I lay;
And at some time I shut my eyes and heard
The rumbling roar of Friday's nightly traffic:
Yelling and back-fire, distant sirens,
Whoosh of slow stampede from State.
The night draped heavy on the trees,
The rattling leaves and northerly breeze, a sad tale told,
Of forests gone to the memory of trees
Grown scant among these scurriers.
And then my eyes upon the dancing leaves
Beheld a sparkling radiance that fluttered,
When of a sudden the light blinked out, and I
Sat straight to search about me for its source;
But nothing there, no hint of movement,
No one pointing his flashlight.
Then I said, This is the ghost light
I have seen from time to time.
A few days after that I read my friend's
Obituary and I knew the light was Bobby.
I am flung wide open! I am splashed
Asunder just to see the face I knew,
In life the confidence of one with heart
Who lived as I have lived,
Who shined so bright as all sons do,
A star above the canyon grieved for
By his sisters and his parents.
We'd played beneath the tall trees by the pond
And taunted from the rocks and sage,
And knew each other in the smiling ages
Under summer sky and cottonwood,
And ran together waving wooden sticks
At enemies imagined yet we knew no enemies,
Pretending they would lay us low unto
Our very graves while we ran high and laughing.
Bobby, friend of friends but I abandoned
You to strangers,
To the unforgiving force of dour,
Shuttered suburbs in the heat and glare
And strangers peering out,
And knew you never again and yet you are
The myth behind my words,
Provoking from me syllables and dreams
Of sanctuary
In the secret heart of silence,
In your subtle smile of knowing
Far beyond these feeble words that are
The trap of consciousness to me, dear Friend.
I know again my old desire for another
Whose indifference to me stung my soul.
But does she know the saint she is behind
These stages of my life, my fellow
In the sweet dominions where the creek
Rolled underneath the road and swept the ghosts
Of play into the sea of tears?
Does she know that in my memory
She is beloved Carol, sister to
My blood's brother?
I will tell it and confess I loved her then
And feared her as I feared the eye
Of Heaven hanging over sunset on
The indigo facade of Antelope Island set
Against a sky of dying embers,
Over the shimmering sea of tears beneath it
Glowing silver in a light of moon;
And hopeful was I, fingers on the bark
Of cherries through the brusque night moving
To a moment
When the constellations glistened,
Dreaming of her, pretty in her pleated skirt
Who'd come to call you home.
My friend, my unforgotten, ghostly
In the leaves of my own middle age,
Who came to bid farewell,
I pray that you are with the Lord, Good Soul,
And pray that we will meet again beyond the veil,
And there will be no tears, and love will flow
As free as our beloved creek come tumbling
Down from sage and willow,
Where we will go together hand in hand
To everlasting dawn.