Let me remind you (the dream poem)
By Alec Finlay
Let me remind you
that everyone with a window already jumped.
—Joshua Beckman, “New Haven”
we’ve to bear what keeps us in mind:
the kindness of a friend who drove
all night to be near, a daughter
practiced in arriving, come in time
to lift mum safe from the last bath,
the pad on the hessian bedside table
with biro lists of gifts, garden tasks
(scored-out), and a plan to end pain
made, made again, but never taken.
The night she left the shock was mes-
meric. I held the bed so’s not to go
out the window. I had to learn dreams:
echelons of silver planes in fingertip
rose through her air, behind where
she was waving on the—uh-oh—crown
of the tallest pine she has to fall from.
Not to worry, it’s my dream:
replay the action—fast-as-dreams-allow—
by the fifth go I’ve prepared a catch-
all nest for her to plummet into.
In her dream the hill she’d chosen
has a hazel whose suckers grew
in knuckle-duster loops and folds,
with an arch we took turns to wriggle
ourselves free of the muck the bottle-
smashers make. A we do vow to
parley with terror in nature,
as you used to in our future.
Another dream had her forcing
a pitiless swim 8 miles into the bay.
I dreamed lifeguards to fetch her back.
They buried her in a pit of sand
but I made sure they dug her out un-
harmed (it’s my dream) and floated
her in the water, strong arms by her
sides, draped in blades of kelp
and hung with cysts of air to breathe.
The pit is slim (as happiness is)
and—in a dream—becomes the cold
paragraph of sea we dived in
when we dreamt our sea loft in Fife.
That, over there, is the same bit of sea
in my kitchen window, coloring
each lock-down day, adding a gull
on the chimney pot to repeat
how you’d laugh when we’d chant
one-leg, one-leg, cheering, for any
gull’s the one if it can stand on
one-leg. If this sun-cure flops,
falling out a window or wading
in the waves—like my blind dog
paddling toward the dim bulb
of sunset—remain options.
When there’s this pain this often.
I dreamed the dog roped to a car
that’s—oh no—accelerating. So
I dreamed me to leap, cut, leap,
cut it free. Comforting the injury
my dream dog comforted me (muttering):
don’t be so stupid, those drownings
aren’t waves, but a swim to tide in.
It means something like you
can seep your head in water while
I bathe in an oxygen life’s intent on.
Source: Poetry (December 2020)