I think one of the things that poetry
does is to keep wishes alive and wishes
that have no possibility of ever being fulfilled.
And I think this poem is true to that idea called
"Dream Theory."
"Not every dream I wake from leaves me feeling uneasy,
some are wishes pure and simple that pass through customs
unmolested, fitting grandma's theories of dream as much
as Freud's.
My dream last night about traveling with Lynn
in Europe seeming to express a wish for happiness,
uncompromised by the clamor of fact,
the 30 year gap between the present
and the era in which I failed to persuade her I was her destiny,
was an inch wide crack for my feelings
to skip across as they charge the gangway with all
our luggage off for a voyage we never managed to take before.
All those with degrees in dream analysis
are free to turn for the day to the harder problems
that social workers and teachers are up against.
In my dream, the reality principle
showed merely as gray streaks in her hair
and a free few wrinkles that seemed becoming.
Reality made us linger so long in Mantua
over pumpkin pasta sharing the inside story
about the Renaissance that we almost
missed our train to Verona.
The only painful part of the dream
was leaving her at a mountain hotel
when I went to lecture in Paris on the Bastille
that poetry opens.
But soon I returned to find her standing alone on the terrace,
her face lit by a smile that anyone
skilled at interpreting smiles would say
showed how happy she felt that moment, how lucky.
And when I woke, I marveled how lightly
the weight of history presses on the sleepers chest as he
dreams.
Now that was the muscle that pumps the blood,
finds the work a little harder each year,
but little seem changed for whatever
it is that makes a muscle pound if a name is mentioned
or a letter that fails to arrive is
imagined waiting among the magazines and the catalogs.
So what, if the signature and the date are missing
and the paper is so yellow and wrinkled
I have to step to the window to read it.
That hand, the heart says stoutly, I know it anywhere."