Woon & Associates        Literary Consulting

Poem by David Booth

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January Light

 

 

Occupation dream: paperboy tromping through snow at dawn, licensing clerk hunting copyright infringements, green teacher talking too much to teens about her love life.

 

Animal dream: ladybug, deer, corpse of lion seal. “In the dream I know I am going to the shore to see the carcass of a lion seal.”

 

Landscape dream: It begins as one and has all the characteristics of a western landscape coming up from the sea, not a person in sight, not a thing personified.

 

I remember once as a young man clipping an article about diplomats from nearly ninety nations gathering in Oslo to ban antipersonnel landmines by treaty. A French delegate like a figure in a dream calls it one of the rare moments in international life where the reasons of state encounter the sentiment of peoples. Invade my pillow. Dust my feet. He prompts my dream of a beach I can see as a child from my bedroom window. The sun is low, the water rough and reddish. Those few people gathered in the lower righthand corner can’t take a step without falling on what looks like infantrymen’s helmets, olive drab, buried halfway to their crowns in the sand. No one moves without being killed or maimed. Years later I am awake for this and looking at a photograph of the selfsame beach, the sun low down and the water, rough and oily looking. Helms made heart-shaped by nature, carried overtop olive-green bodies eternal, waddling out of the ocean. A caption reads: Mexico’s olive ridley sea turtle makes a comeback. They return to their natal beaches to form mass nestings along the Pacific coast, far from fields rigged against wanderers.[1]

 

Synthesis: She imagines her children as heliotropes, standing at different angles from the slope, the sun itself a smudge like a thumbprint, the flowers themselves throwing long sparse shadows.

 

[1] The Spanish arribar (to arrive) derives from Latin ad- (to) + ripa (shore/bank). An arribada is the synchronous mass-nesting event of hundreds or thousands of sea turtles arriving on the same beach to lay eggs.

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