Haibun

                                       A DREAM VISIT 

Once more I'm going home to the street of my childhood.  The trolley taking me is going too fast, and I'm afraid I'll miss my stop.  I'm afraid I won't remember it.  Shops along the route are not the same.  I feel lost, anxious.  I pull the cord.

I've reached my street, and it is as it used to be.  The ice house on one corner; a candy and tobacco shop on the other. It is a working man's street, one and two family houses on one side and factories on the other.

It is summer.  I inhale a miasma of odors, the strongest from the Goodyear plant.

                                    12 o'clock–
                                    in the shade, the clanging
                                    of lunch buckets

On this visit, I am an adult and married.  I know this, although my husband isn't with me.  I am an age I can't determine.  Thirties, forties?  Maybe older.  I live at number 42 on the second floor, above my grandparents.  They are still there, and it makes perfect sense.  I climb the front stairs to the second floor.

 
                                    the afternoon sun
                                    through the stained glass window—
                                    climbing a rainbow

The flat is not large, yet we live here, my parents and I, my sister, my husband.  My father sleeps heavily.  He had died.  Or so I had thought, and I wonder where he's been.  My mother indicates the need to be quiet.

 Moving slowly and softly I prepare food.  My mother and I together.  Roast chicken, pasta.  Large platters of food never to be eaten.  They dissolve.  My parents dissolve.  For a short time—minutes, seconds perhaps—I see and feel the inexplicable reality of the unreal, and I am grateful for this brief meeting.

                                    mourning doves call—

                                    in dreams, neither hello
                                    nor goodbye

Contemporary Haibun On-line, Aug. 2005