Shadow of a dream

04/14 2023

A meeting, a comparison of notes.
Not too strange, just two strangers
On opposite ends of the table.
The light burned low,
I thought I spied a smile
Of strange and ancient lands.
See the map of stars above,
And mistake them for a car passing by.

Not a thing do I recognize,
Not even the way her eyes search
Across crowded beer halls.
I was waiting by the cigarette machine,
It took me a while to find it.
Mundane moments surprise me,
Like the gentle nudge from a coffee cup,
Which leads to hour-long oratories.
Caesar on the table next to us scoffs
At our rhetoric naivety.

"I guess I am just afraid of the cold."
She says, as the doors of the train close.
We sit next to a brown-eyed musician
With an old guitar and harmonica around his neck.
He sings of a dream he had last night,
And the blue notes they jump at us,
Especially when she gets up to leave.
It was the first time I realized
What she meant of everlasting cold.

Then everything was familiar but the name
Of that feeling of a distant sunset hitting our faces.
Even the blind man next to use spoke about that dream,
A dream just like this: golden gates,
Which open themselves to a blue jay's song.
She was the primrose, and I was the fates
Spinning the yarns of winter's cold grip.
Through the reflection of my sunglasses
I saw her grasping her pendant with frosted fingertips.

The angle between her eyes now unstable,
Or was it the way I told myself to never go away?
Jamaican spiced rum in empty corridors,
Everything now but particulars;
The strange land beyond time,
Beyond thought and doubt.
Metaphors, picture frames and memory.
She laughed at something I said.
I laughed at something she said.
Moments of quiet anticipation.
Laying prostrate on a dirty asylum floor.

"How does the tale pick up again",
I say to her as she stands in a red dress
Reciting every letter of the alphabet.
Through the land of the cognitive pantomime,
Of a dream experienced as a distant memory,
The moon gives me the shadow of a glistening eye;
Are those tears I see falling in the corner?
Divided the shadow of the dream falls,
Just like for every woman and man
During some point in their lives.