985. MY DREAMING

MY DREAMING
And oh how I dreamed of silver,
silver and you - gloss-gowned
hair on a head of jewels; fantasy
and phantasmagoria together
entwined and just as still.
-
Joseph Brodsky and Harold Bloom,
both are postage stamps now in the
mailroom of my mind - and a Walt
Whitman waterscape too. Robert Frost,
so sure-footed yet lost, in turn stopped
by for tea. We marveled at the glasses,
the water, the great New England sea.
'And I wasn't even born here,' he muttered,
'yet that's all they think of me.' But Rhea Schultz
was my real betrayal, an aid to make believe,

a matrix of all that be.
-
She smiled seriously and said: 'my life,
my own life of course, has a serious, sensuous
balance I've kept. Like mountains to the shoulder,
I've loved the sunlight and the rain together - as
anyone must, don't you think?' With that (my
memory says) she took my hand and quickly
kissed me. 'So let's be just more than friends, do
you mind?' We sat there for a moment. Some
coffee-waiter, or whatever they call them now,
brought a tray. Outside, the morning overmisted
whitely with a gentle fog - 23rd or 18th, what
was it, I don't remember. We savored the contentment
and it never wavered - and all the dreary cars were
dragging, while the homeless spat and some dogs
were barking on their twisted leashes.
-
'I am nothing really,' - she said again until I
abruptly stopped her. 'Why do you say that?
Stop it again - you are more than the sum of
your parts and, believe you me, those parts
are art.'
-
We came to a laugh at that, and stopped.
But all that - oh! - was long ago. My
God, how I miss the past.