Dreaming the Poem

 

 

Note: I'm pleased to introduce the work of poet Richard Davis, who swam out of the blue and gave us this wonderful thing. We worked it over a few times and I lobbied hard to get the moldy cheese out of the first stanza. The poet disagreed, and he prevailed.  

— CF

My notebooks and keyboard
are somewhere under them pizza cartons
waiting for an idea.
By now,
they probly smell like moldy mozzarelly.

Phone in my head hasn't rung in days
and it ain't ringing now.
If I was famous
they'd have a fancy name for this,
like creative impasse,
but I aint famous
so what it is
is just
blank
zero
nada.

Nights I get this stupid dream:
I'm in another country
where total strangers come up
and whisper to me
in some foreign language
which I somehow understand
(it's a dream, see?)
except as soon as they stop whispering
I forget what they said.
Same dream several nights running
and by now I'm pretty pissed off
so next time it comes around
I stand up and yell at  the foreigners —
No More Riddles, I say,
you got somethin to tell me
Spell It Out!

and right about then
this dame shows up.

Long tall drink of water in a dark blue gabardine skirt suit with padded shoulders  showing its inner character at the cuffs, off-white opencollar blouse possibly silk, nails of her slim fingers matching her hair:  a deep red misbehavior tumbling in uneven curls down below her shoulders, eyes green or blue depending on the light, the way I always imagined the Irish Sea would look, mascara slapped on in a hurry after a night of drinking.
Central Casting's idea of the Gal Friday from some old film:
not quite beautiful,
just kind of unforgettable.

Honey, she says
she's so close my spine resonates to her singlemalt voice, close enough I can smell the stale smoke of unfiltered camels coming off her clothes, close enough to pick up a dab or two of magnolia plus a faint trace of maybe doublemint, close enough to smell the woman underneath.

Honey, she says,
you know how it is down here.
Down here
all you ever get is riddles
anagrams
cryptograms
crosswords with tricky clues. 
Guy'd go nuts trying to figure them,
and besides,
what's the point? —
they're mostly smoke,
the real action's someplace else.
You get my drift, honey?

Either I'm drunk, or her other hand just grazed my trouserfront.  I nod stupidly to the freckles on her cleavage, till she turns and walks away in that loosejointed gait I knew she'd have — you know the one I mean, the walk that says I know you're watching but I don't give a shit if you like what you see or not — right on over to the edge of the dream, where she turns.

If this was a scene from a movie, she says,
I'd exit through a door over here.
But now that you know how to call me
there'll be no door between us.

She turns away, then swings back.

Oh, she says,
and in the movie
the script  would say to give you a wink
but you might think
it was just another riddle,
so I won't.

And then, with a brief, fast flicker of something at one corner of that laurenbacall mouth,
she's gone.

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