Nightmare Recitative
For John. A tale told on awakening.
Think of it as experimental opera.
You and I are the dramatis personae,
newly arrived at something like a campus
(a plot already based on our real lives),
young and not married yet.
How to describe
the opening scene, its visual phantasms?
It somehow blends the bland Midwestern modern
of our late lives, the Federal-period rigor
of undergraduate days, and a weird mix
of history tour, Lord of the Rings, and Disney,
through which we move in a glitz of twinkling lights
and Muzak, like suburban malls at Christmas.Here is a doorway: college dining hall
as medieval Hell-mouth, writhing color
to groans from a calliope. We laugh,
saying we'll meet there later, while I waft
off-scene, toward something like my freshman dorm
of fifty years ago.
And once inside,
my mind loses its grip on where I'm going.
Room numbers drip and run; spaces go soft.
Begging for help, I'm led by faceless beings
whom I don't question, and don't trust, and now
I'm outdoors, whelmed again; it's suddenly clear
there's more than one fantastic cafeteria.
Timpani grumble under my unease:
How will we find each other?
Just as quickly
the set dissolves: I find myself on a tram,
dragged fast and far from where I meant to find you,
panicking as the scene screams through a city,
crossing long bridges over glittering bays
with views of textbook European skylines.Then without explanation, I'm marooned
in the empty concourse of a shopping center.
(No soundtrack. Things are starting to unravel.)
A cleaner—I only know her hair was red—
lends me her phone to call you. But I can't,
because I realize: there are no cell phones
in that part of our lives, and I despair,
and shout, and wake.
No point in spending time
interpreting; meanings are all too clear.
The grand amusement parks of academe
shrivel to little more than strip-mall storefronts.
The world our schooling rigged us for shape-shifts
to an ungraspable, a blob, a blur.
The past we share keeps on evaporating.
My memory, especially for numbers,
begins to lose its hold. Some faceless evil
will lever us apart.All I have left
is your plain presence in the weak-eyed light
of a year's close. Our radiators' clang
the day into reality. I love you.
Wake up and face their strange music with me.
