Atlantis

1. FAITH

“I’ve been having these

awful dreams, each a little different,

though the core’s the same—

we’re walking in a field,

Wally and Arden and I, a stretch of grass

with a highway running beside it,

or a path in the woods that opens

onto a road. Everything’s fine,

then the dog sprints ahead of us,

excited; we’re calling but

he’s racing down a scent and doesn’t hear us,

and that’s when he goes

onto the highway. I don’t want to describe it.

Sometimes it’s brutal and over,

and others he’s struck and takes off

so we don’t know where he is

or how bad. This wakes me

every night now, and I stay awake;

I’m afraid if I sleep I’ll go back

into the dream. It’s been six months,

almost exactly, since the doctor wrote

not even a real word

but an acronym, a vacant

four-letter cipher

that draws meanings into itself,

reconstitutes the world.

We tried to say it was just

a word; we tried to admit

it had power and thus to nullify it

by means of our acknowledgement.

I know the current wisdom:

bright hope, the power of wishing you’re well.

He’s just so tired, though nothing

shows in any tests, Nothing,

the doctor says, detectable;

the doctor doesn’t hear what I do,

that trickling, steadily rising nothing

that makes him sleep all day,

vanish into fever’s tranced afternoons,

and I swear sometimes

when I put my head to his chest

I can hear the virus humming

like a refrigerator.

Which is what makes me think

you can take your positive attitude

and go straight to hell.

We don’t have a future,

we have a dog.

Who is he?

Soul without speech,

sheer, tireless faith,

he is that-which-goes-forward,

black muzzle, black paws

scouting what’s ahead;

he is where we’ll be hit first,

he’s the part of us

that’s going to get it.

I’m hardly awake on our morning walk

—always just me and Arden now—

and sometimes I am still

in the thrall of the dream,

which is why, when he took a step onto Commercial

before I’d looked both ways,

I screamed his name and grabbed his collar.

And there I was on my knees,

both arms around his neck

and nothing coming,

and when I looked into that bewildered face

I realized I didn’t know what it was

I was shouting at,

I didn’t know who I was trying to protect.”

2. REPRIEVE

I woke in the night

and thought, It was a dream,

nothing has torn the future apart,

we have not lived years

in dread, it never happened,

I dreamed it all. And then

there was this sensation of terrific pressure

lifting, as if I were rising

in one of those old diving bells,

lightening, unburdening. I didn’t know

how heavy my life had become—so much fear,

so little knowledge. It was like

being young again, but I understood

how light I was, how without encumbrance,—

and so I felt both young and awake,

which I never felt

when I was young. The curtains moved

—it was still summer, all the windows open—

and I thought, I can move that easily.

I thought my dream had lasted for years,

a decade, a dream can seem like that,

I thought, There’s so much more time ...

And then of course the truth

came floating back to me.

You know how children

love to end stories they tell

by saying, It was all a dream? Years ago,

when I taught kids to write,

I used to tell them this ending spoiled things,

explaining and dismissing

what had come before. Now I know

how wise they were, to prefer

that gesture of closure,

their stories rounded not with a sleep

but a waking. What other gift

comes close to a reprieve?

This was the dream that Wally told me:

I was in the tunnel, he said,

and there really was a light at the end,

and a great being standing in the light.

His arms were full of people, men and women,

but his proportions were all just right—I mean

he was the size of you or me.

And the people said, Come with us,

we’re going dancing. And they seemed so glad

to be going, and so glad to have me

join them, but I said,

I’m not ready yet. I didn’t know what to do,

when he finished,

except hold the relentless

weight of him, I didn’t know

what to say except, It was a dream,

nothing’s wrong now,

it was only a dream.

3. MICHAEL’S DREAM

Michael writes to tell me his dream:

I was helping Randy out of bed,

supporting him on one side

with another friend on the other,

and as we stood him up, he stepped out

of the body I was holding and became

a shining body, brilliant light

held in the form I first knew him in.

This is what I imagine will happen,

the spirit’s release. Michael,

when we support our friends,

one of us on either side, our arms

under the man or woman’s arms,

what is it we’re holding? Vessel,

shadow, hurrying light? All those years

I made love to a man without thinking

how little his body had to do with me;

now, diminished, he’s never been so plainly

himself—remote and unguarded,

an otherness I can’t know

the first thing about. I said,

You need to drink more water

or you’re going to turn into

an old dry leaf. And he said,

Maybe I want to be an old leaf.

In the dream Randy’s leaping into

the future, and still here; Michael’s holding him

and releasing at once. Just as Steve’s

holding Jerry, though he’s already gone,

Marie holding John, gone, Maggie holding

her John, gone, Carlos and Darren

holding another Michael, gone,

and I’m holding Wally, who’s going.

Where isn’t the question,

though we think it is;

we don’t even know where the living are,

in this raddled and unraveling “here.”

What is the body? Rain on a window,

a clear movement over whose gaze?

Husk, leaf, little boat of paper

and wood to mark the speed of the stream?

Randy and Jerry, Michael and Wally

and John: lucky we don’t have to know

what something is in order to hold it.

4. ATLANTIS

I thought your illness a kind of solvent

dissolving the future a little at a time;

I didn’t understand what’s to come

was always just a glimmer

up ahead, veiled like the marsh

gone under its tidal sheet

of mildly rippling aluminum.

What these salt distances were

is also where they’re going:

from blankly silvered span

toward specificity: the curve

of certain brave islands of grass,

temporary shoulder-wide rivers

where herons ply their twin trades

of study and desire. I’ve seen

two white emissaries unfold

like heaven’s linen, untouched,

enormous, a fluid exhalation. Early spring,

too cold yet for green, too early

for the tumble and wrack of last season

to be anything but promise,

but there in the air was white tulip,

marvel, triumph of all flowering, the soul

lifted up, if we could still believe

in the soul, after so much diminishment ...

Breath, from the unpromising waters,

up, across the pond and the two-lane highway,

pure purpose, over the dune,

gone. Tomorrow’s unreadable

as this shining acreage;

the future’s nothing

but this moment’s gleaming rim.

Now the tide’s begun

its clockwork turn, pouring,

in the day’s hourglass,

toward the other side of the world,

and our dependable marsh reappears

—emptied of that starched and angular grace

that spirited the ether, lessened,

but here. And our ongoingness,

what there’ll be of us? Look,

love, the lost world

rising from the waters again:

our continent, where it always was,

emerging from the half-light, unforgettable,

drenched, unchanged.

5. COASTAL

Cold April and the neighbor girl

—our plumber’s daughter—

comes up the wet street

from the harbor carrying,

in a nest she’s made

of her pink parka,

a loon. It’s so sick,

she says when I ask.

Foolish kid,

does she think she can keep

this emissary of air?

Is it trust or illness

that allows the head

—sleek tulip—to bow

on its bent stem

across her arm?

Look at the steady,

quiet eye. She is carrying

the bird back from indifference,

from the coast

of whatever rearrangement

the elements intend,

and the loon allows her.

She is going to call

the Center for Coastal Studies,

and will swaddle the bird

in her petal-bright coat

until they come.

She cradles the wild form.

Stubborn girl.

6. NEW DOG

Jimi and Tony

can’t keep Dino,

their cocker spaniel;

Tony’s too sick,

the daily walks

more pressure

than pleasure,

one more obligation

that can’t be met.

And though we already

have a dog, Wally

wants to adopt,

wants something small

and golden to sleep

next to him and

lick his face.

He’s paralyzed now

from the waist down,

whatever’s ruining him

moving upward, and

we don’t know

how much longer

he’ll be able to pet

a dog. How many men

want another attachment,

just as they’re

leaving the world?

Wally sits up nights

and says, I’d like

some lizards, a talking bird,

some fish. A little rat.

So after I drive

to Jimi and Tony’s

in the Village and they

meet me at the door and say,

We can’t go through with it,

we can’t give up our dog,

I drive to the shelter

—just to look—and there

is Beau: bounding and

practically boundless,

one brass concatenation

of tongue and tail,

unmediated energy,

too big, wild,

perfect. He not only

licks Wally’s face

but bathes every

irreplaceable inch

of his head, and though

Wally can no longer

feed himself he can lift

his hand, and bring it

to rest on the rough gilt

flanks when they are,

for a moment, still.

I have never seen a touch

so deliberate.

It isn’t about grasping;

the hand itself seems

almost blurred now,

softened, though

tentative only

because so much will

must be summoned,

such attention brought

to the work—which is all

he is now, this gesture

toward the restless splendor,

the unruly, the golden,

the animal, the new.

Source: Atlantis (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1995)