Second Dream

I was a woman in a prison camp, my job

was to work in the yard. I walked away,

drifted north, like I do, and came to Canada; but by then I was

a man dressed in a long soviet coat, wool with a red collar. Better I

would have retreated to the mountains, I thought, or the interior.

Why not just go on into Canada? someone said.

It was how the border had appeared so quickly when my experience was

that the roads that were the way over were

always further north than I had figured when I’d set out.

In my experience—waking

life—nothing had readied me for such an arrival.

Walking north, I was surely out of bounds, a city woman, then

a man indistinguishable from his own prowess.

You know how I figure, I thought.

Typically, I dreamed and at the same time watched the dream.

The gate was open.

I watched myself as if from a car at a drive-in movie.

I could have been up on the angry mountains, I thought, that

could be the subject matter or the theme.

Someone else stole my coat at a soup kitchen while I ate so I took another one—

puffy, polyester filled—and walked on, heading for a “triangle of roads” I remembered

coming out of the woods, having met

those roads but as a young man. Figure

that. The woods came down the hill and stopped and a single

bright road, looping, led up into the recollected triangle—

it was not of course really a triangle but three ways, three lanes into the trees,

that met the bright road in a series of intersections.

I perceived a common drama but saw endless jungle.

Name me, I said.

I had been a handsome woman of indeterminate size and color.

If I were her I’d be a different animal, said I, I’d be

down on the coast, I’d

have made a plan.

Were I she, I’d likely be a monster’s dark mother, I thought.

I didn’t know when to stop.

The mountain intervened—

unhidden, foul-figured.

Ask me.

(Name it.)

Vividness can be misleading.

I don’t know where to stop. Name

another ending.

Source: Negro Mountain (The University of Chicago Press, 2023)