Three till Seven

Note: This was a dream of mine. I have this warning here because some visitors have thought my life had just gone to pot, when really they were only reading one of my crazy dreams. :)

The dream had been going on before this, but I don’t remember that much of it. I was at my grandmother’s house, but it looked like she was staying at a Holiday Inn because a Holiday Inn truck pulled up outside her house. I went up some very narrow stairs to her porch, and it looked like there were other porches. I didn’t have to knock, she just came out. She peered at me, but couldn’t tell who I was. I jokingly told her I was Billie Bob Thornton. “I don’t know who that is,” she replied, looking down at our feet. I laughed and told her my real name, saying, “You ought to know who that is.” She hugged me and smiled.

I dropped to my knees sadly, laying my head on her stomach. We held each other for a long time. From another porch, I heard someone saying, “I came to you because I knew I was going to die,” praying, and what sounded like my grandmother saying a blessing over their head. I started praying, and my grandmother whispered prayers over my head. On the other porch that I could see just slightly, the deck tilted and I heard an “Amen,” then a thump, and a sliding sound. A body started sliding off the deck to the ground below; it was my father.

Past my window,
Up the stairs,
Around the bend in the hall,
Pass five thousand faces
And none of them yours.
On my street, there’s
A man selling fruit
Out of a cart.
He gets new customers every day
But none of them
Know the weight of my heart these days
Like you do.
There’s wine on the counter
Drained spaghetti in a sieve
In the sink
But of all the millions outside my door,
I’m the only one here to eat.
And if it were you who passed by tomorrow,
Or you buying fruit today,
I wouldn’t–
Couldn’t!–
Believe my own eyes, and
I’d eat my dinner alone.

Notes

I got the idea for this when I was participating in a summer program where I was away from home for over a month, and I got very homesick. The poem starts out reflecting that initially, because we got a Family Day in the summer program on which our families could come and visit us, and I sat waiting for them to show up, watching other parents come up to see their kids before mine finally came. The rest of the poem is unrelated to my real life, and I picture it describing the life of some woman whose lover has been away for such a long time that even if he did show up again, she wouldn’t be able to believe it.