Surfacing
Surface from sleep gasping
for consciousness.
Try to sink back, to bring up
with me the story I was in
that I hope will reveal
some insight for
waking life.
An image, miraculously,
presents itself, indescribable, but
so close to the surface.
I grasp with all my mental power,
asking,
"Where? What? Who?"
A memory flickers into consciousness:
a full dream,
early in the night, that woke me.
I can surely retrieve it.
Try again to enter blackness
of mind.
I can't hear the voices now and
as I watch
the amorphous
shreds of shape and color
vanish
and remnants of feeling fly:
dry leaves blown in a wind
through the dark,
gone
as if it never was.
Again the dark door closes
that allowed only stray gleams of light,
hints of mood and message
to leak into awareness
from a process unrelatable to
conscious thought.
Give up and let go
of the idea that I can
make something appear that's
stuck someplace out of reach.
Surrender the illusion that I can
make something spring into
consciousness
like what came unbidden,
unexpected,
one morning last month:
I woke from a dream with the memory of
writing first lines to six poems
But not the lines.
Let the unconscious world thrum on
alone, churning its realities,
conjuring from the day's events
its narratives, no more
bizarre
than what we call real life
or anything we see on
FaceBook, Fox, or The Weather Channel.
Imparting some wisdom to me
was never the point.
Otherwise, why make it so difficult
for me to create anything coherent
from these vague goings-on
that carry no signals to my thinking mind,
but simply struggle through repetition to make
something of themselves.
I get a peek
through an unintended gap in
the wall between us:
the barrier of our differing ways
of expression.
Jung says dreams
feed wakeful modes of being —
a mood if nothing else.
But maybe the unheard hummings-on
modify,
elaborate,
refine,
enlarge,
mold,
curb.
Allow
a chuckle to expand into
long peals of laughter.
Permit
the pause, examining a completed chore,
to grow into satisfaction.
Let
anger burn hot and long
unchecked til it transforms into
drifting smoke and cold ash.
Maybe here in the clear, bright light of
reasonableness
the unremembered images
the unheard voices
the unfelt emotions
are here.
Unrecognized,
here.