National Poetry Month: Two Poems

DREAM REPAIR SHOP

To which at first I brought my VCR
but the woman three people in front of me
in the line was asking for a remedy for her cat
who was also in line, she said, She’s having trouble
sleeping. She paces back & forth as soon
as it gets dark. & the person after her said
something about this dream they couldn’t
get past, so much so that they could feel
something starting to grow out of their hip, &,
look, she was pointing to her hip, I know
it isn’t there but the dream has started to become
a physical sensation. It is hard to leave my house.
She was frowning. & I was curious but embarrassed.
Maybe I’d come to the wrong place.
I thought the “dream” in DREAM REPAIR SHOP meant
something else, & that’s when I saw
a kind of menu of signs like flavors
of ice cream written only kind of neatly
in thinning, blue paint marker & one of them said VCRs,
TVs, SCANNERs, as advertised in the window,
& another said SHOES: SOLES & REPAIRS
& another said Passport photos & DrEAM REPAIR
& another said MisC. so when it was my turn
I asked what miscellaneous could be, like,
for some examples, but the person who could
fix all of these things wouldn’t give me examples,
at first I thought he couldn’t hear me but after asking
a few times I realized he was silently opposed to examples,
so, I told him what I came for, how my tapes
were getting jammed in the VCR & I guess were
recording things or were playing a layer of recordings
from other tapes that it had played before, was that a thing?
Was this something he could look at, please,
& before I knew it, I was telling him about Joan who
had given it to me & maybe somehow some of her tape’s
information had burned into mine even though these were
entirely different tapes just the same machine, sometimes,
for example (!), there was an image of Joan as a child in 1950,
running through, in ribbons of static, the lecture I
was trying to watch & the concert with Ismael Rivera
& how did he think that could be & also not so much a repair,
but when dreams begin to come to me when I am out
in the world & suddenly someone is making the ocean
knot by knot of blues & whites in the pre-history
of my hometown, is there something I should know or do?
How, for example, can you tell the difference between a dream
& a memory & was there a signal or a door he could
help me to make so that I could visit with my loved ones
more easily & what about the dreams that are instructions,
how do I know which are which & if what I want to fix is
exactly what I should not fix? By then I was sitting on the other side
of the counter, drinking coffee & sneezing a little because
of his cat & he was showing me his favorite things on Tik Tok.
It’s just that I miss our lives, my friends, I understood,
& was happy for the faces of strangers entering, one by one,
as was the case before when there were still so many names
yet to be known to us, & every now & then a gust of cold
blew in when a customer opened the door & the bells, all clustered
together, made the clanging sounds they make that we once made.

***

AUGUST


We moved into the house. Our boxes

boxes boxes. A family after another family who left

their little buried colored stones and knots painted blue

onto the young oak making

the sharp, dark eyes of Horus.

When we saw, we felt we understood

it was all a funerary boat, 

ribbons in whatever wind, pink ledge for a bird,

a boat carrying inside, maybe, a mother, floating

home that is this home and not this 

home. So much has come with us

but the hairs of their animals 

fly up, still, through the vent and we eat 

the vegetables they planted

learning to feed which water, which light

and in opening our mouths

thank them all this heat of tiny red in fall

which opens the eye beyond fences, Saturday, Sunday.



Finding you where the flowers and their shadows bow

and nod in such quiet correspondences, I know

and kiss your hand.