Lamp of the Body

Dorothy Waking

28 doRothy waking I dreamt that we were back in Ohio. Proving how little dreams know, I asked about your kid brother, picturing him as a boy, forgetting he’d been found a few summers back hanging from a tree at Alum Creek. When I asked, a thunderhead of black birds dropped like a tarp on the long pines, plucked us up, and carried us to that lonely country where there are no fields of flowers, no one dusting them with snow as fine as confectioner’s sugar. Where there are no balloons to carry us back to the lives we left, and no white handkerchiefs to swish bon voyage at the headstones, rows of baby teeth growing smaller below us, then vanishing. In that country, the forest is all shadow-trees, but the one where your brother swings, where he swings even now because time stopped, is white and gnarled, a deer antler, its bark like bone. His eyes are missing, sockets dark as plum pits. His brown hair scuffs in the wind. 29 Who can wake from that? There is no telling what that wind might blow home with us: crow feathers, scraps of blue gingham, black walnuts in green casings. Their dark ink stains our hands; even burning lye can’t wash it off. Who can wake from that? But we do. We wake and point to others in the room. And you were there, and you were there. And you. ...