Refrigerator Dreams
was a motionless kitchen.
Abandoned is
too dramatic a word
for expressing that nobody
ate in the dream
and I couldn’t hear anyone breathe—
but that was how it was.
Salvation showed
its face only after the end of my asking,
to prove that what heaven
there was was there,
in the bright, indifferent yawn
of the empty refrigerator.
It stood, immense
in the face of nothing else, against
the wall, a luminous monument, a
magnificent accident;
A hunger thrummed inside it
like a pulse in the dark hallway of
a throat, strangely
private, so it filled me with the
sense of overhearing someone else’s
inner argument,
of staring down a corridor
whose walls stared back so hard
it almost hurt.
At the end of that hall was a door,
eternally white, inviolate (there is
never not a door
in the dream) and I knew the door would open—
if it would open for me, and it wouldn’t
—onto where the light
was kept. It hummed, Yes,
you, yes, you. It warned, Not yet.
Not knowing how
I knew, I knew my penance was to
stand here on the edge of several
prepositions,
to let electric brightness knife
across my face until
I woke (or else
forever) and never
to enter that
glow
of metallic
immaculate
cold.
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Check out the last ekphrasis poem here. Or you can return home.
Go Maddy! Love it.
Chickenflicker
February 19, 2008 at 9:32 pm
my goodness, this is absolutely wonderful.
Micah
February 20, 2008 at 1:26 am
Happy Birthday! Treat Yourself, have a mid-night snack.
Barry
August 24, 2008 at 7:21 pm
really good, handful :)
Leon
April 3, 2009 at 1:44 pm