Lenny DellaRocca

What Sleep May Bring
 
I turn in my sleep and each shimmering vignette falls into a box in the attic. The recurring child with sunflower eyes, the man with a voice from October ninth, and a gypsy gazing from a cracked mirror. There are teachers with the heads of giraffes. My uncle is a black girl with a speech impediment. At breakfast my wife says, I dreamt I was flying down the street I grew up on, and I say: Einstein told me to stand at the window to download a new god. Many dreams are shut up in that box, but do they escape after one dies. Is that why my mother died wide-eyed. Maybe she was watching picnics in the Catskills where unknown family played bocci. Was it wrong to shut her eyes like I’d seen in movies. Did that end her dreams before she flew to her familiar dead. Who’s to say we don’t wake in a previous life knowing something we aren’t supposed to know. That time I saw a note under a windshield wiper eight hours before Susan put it there, was that a dream from a life phasing in from another sleep in which I turned onto my back, waking for a moment before diving back into another life still to come.
 
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Waves Dream
 
My therapist says pay attention to how I feel in dreams. Especially the strange ones. I told her I dreamt about gravity waves again. It’s said they travel at the speed of light and make invisible ripples in space. They squeeze and stretch anything in their path as they pass. That’s word for word from Wikipedia, I tell her. I wonder if that’s why I felt like I was on the other side of deja vu. Here we go, she says. If you’ve ever been in love with the wrong woman you know what I mean. Her again, she says. Yes, French kisses and arguments with the intensity of a wah-wah pedal. My therapist rolls her eyes. But it was tidal waves back then. Ever have those. They’re different than gravity waves. I had another witch doctor then. Not as sarcastic as you. Anyway, Susan sat in the break room with a cup of tea and a love letter to another guy. That night I’m at the beach on a sunny day. And here it comes, the wave, so high I can’t see the top of it. I woke up sick and white. I pissed myself. How did you feel. In the dream, I mean. Like I swallowed the moon. Men aren’t so different than women when they try to let go, she says. Let go. How do you let go of a birthmark. She was the light switch in a room full of love triangles. I’m writing this stuff down. Do you want a copy. What about now, these other waves. Well, the vertigo comes and goes, and the ripples, they’re invisible aren’t they. Sometimes I don’t even know she’s there.
 
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Fame Dream
 
Orson Wells flickers at an outdoor cafe, his left hand in his hair at the back of his head. He’s pulling something out of a dream he’s had. I don’t know how I know this. He’s telling a stranger opposite him that there’s a note in the air clean as Eve before she put the world in her mouth. He says her mouth is all the art the world needs. When she spoke I could hear her, Orson says, I could hear her from the other end of a long line of oak trees on either side of a well-worn path marching to a white mansion in Louisiana. I think it was Heaven, he says. The stranger sips espresso from a demitasse made of egg shell. A bird once flew from this cup. I think of the day my mother died when I think of birds flying from cups, the stranger says. Orson and the stranger don’t seem to know I’m standing here camera in hand until the shutter clicks. Sparrows hopping under the table bounce away like electrons in a physics diagram. They look at me now, Orson, stranger, wide-eyed surprised that only sudden rain brings when it falls from an open sky so blue the sun stops on its wheels. Orson says he’d like me to join them, Have a biscotti, he says. It tastes like Greek music. I don’t know how it can, I say. But I must go. And I do. I leave. At the next cafe in an endless row of cafes, Lillian Gish is having lunch with someone who seems to be disappearing. I reach for my camera, but Lillian puts out her hand, touches mine, and I can’t stop crying. It’s ok, she says. Listen, can you hear that. It’s Charlie. A small bird flies out of her cup. 
 
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Mother in a Snow Globe
 
My mother plays Beautiful Dreamer electrified in lamplight. There’s a blizzard. It’s hard not to fall asleep. I imagine I’m sitting on the milk box frozen shut on the stoop, the oaks hold out their arms trying to dance in the snow. The kitchen makes itself known, yellow wall phone wants to make a call to anyone up this late. There must be others not asleep. Perhaps the stranger from that day in the ‘40s, the man with a blonde guitar who my sister said was crying. Celia was there. Said our mother spoke to him so quietly it was like taking a bath in an empty house or crows watching people go by from the trees. The three of them stood on electrified ice. Snow stopped in an old movie, Celia said, and everyone in town sang Auld Lang Syne. She was only four so it made sense. It was hard for her not to fall asleep holding our mother’s hand. I imagine the amber glow above the stove, the mouse in the corner with its hunger, music coming undone by the chord in my mother’s hands, and the colored lights in the eaves outside making it snow all night. Trees trying to hold onto each other in the moonless yard. That look on their faces. The house is a love story from the other side of town, the piano in the air, dreaming. Outside again I watch my mother electrified in lamplight. Colored lights in the eaves, below them the window-box of black shriveled flowers burnt with snow.
 
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Wistful Secrets
 
Cat, you call yourself the Queen of Gardens and I don’t dispute that. But I know a mockingbird who disagrees though I’m baffled by his language. Penny, you believe your cousins fell from the sky and invented starlight. Maybe, but only if they gather together in a million silver heaps if they want to be more than wishful thinking. And Train, dearest Train, you have grandeur in your whistle even if it calls to barrel fires and men sleeping in the dirt offering hubcap talismans before your flying windows. Come, my black wisdom tooth, curl up in my lap and dream of carp. Listen, my little shiny man, we have a date so be careful of pocket holes and sidewalks. And you my handsome machine, lift from your clickety-clackety click and rise. Rise into a bright blue sky and give the clouds a ride.
 
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Sanctuary
 
When darkness is jumbled up in my heart I wade into your river, love, and a plane pulls an orange moon behind it, clouds write memoirs about fleeting sky on water and trees on a sunny bank lean to see themselves disappear, a weathered fence staggers through weathered hills, and three feet above rough ground some jazz in the dying sun, a parade of wildflowers, I mean, a commotion of yellow jackets thrumming for queen’s favor. When cruel things are jumbled all to hell in my heart your face reminds me of another country where saints look out from doorways in the rain. Five hundred shrines of Madonna and Child in five hundred tired streets, fountains older than some wars. You’re my home where clotheslines drip clean angels, a church stoop beneath the moon. 

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Lenny DellaRocca is founding editor and publisher of South Florida Poetry Journal-SoFloPoJo and publisher/editor of Witchery, a place for Epoems. He has new poems in Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Rattle and forthcoming in I-70 Review.