My grandmother has been in my dreams lately. She was a woman who painted, gardened, swam daily, and taught me to eat with the right fork. I’ve been puzzling over her sudden return to my sleeping life. Then, this week, I learned that a dear friend I met in my twenties, a painter, calligrapher, gardener, who also knew about the right fork and who spent her entire life living her own way, is in hospice care with terminal cancer. Now, it seems clear that, in the way of dreams, she and my grandmother have conflated and that she, Kim, was tugging at the fabric of the collective unconscious to let me know that she was in this transitional time.
I will write more about Kim later. Some of you reading this blog know her, by coincidence. She would be abashed to know that I am writing about her. For now, I’ll post this recent poem about my grandmother and, I see now, about Kim McDodge.
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I Dream of My Grandmother in a Frank Lloyd Wright House
The roof pebbled flat,
the rectangular windows,
white stucco walls.
Inside, the light, underwater green,
filtered through curtains.
I find she
isn’t home. She has gone
somewhere interesting
in a big car.
On the table:
her bracelets, a necklace,
a few crushed tissues,
a filmy scarf,
dull gold. And pens
and magazines, detritus
of a life–
she can’t wait any
longer for me. I stand
with my intentions
smelling the stale air
in the house—or
is it the exhale
of her impatience
as she gathered up her keys?
In any case, she is off,
driving away
her own self, now,
headed to a gathering
of clear minds
Tags: dreams, friendship, garden, Kim McDodge, negative space, poetry, Psyche, spring
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