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In Dreams
Kim Addonizio
After eighteen years there’s no real grief left
for the man who was my father.
I hardly think of him anymore,
and those dreams I used to have,
in which he’d be standing in a room of people
I didn’t know—maybe his new friends,
if the dead have friendships—
those dreams no longer trouble my sleep.
He’s not in the crooked houses I wander through
or in the field by the highway
where I’m running, chasing down
some important piece of paper,
desperate to reach it
as it’s lifted in the wake of trucks
or flattened and marked by passing cars,
as it’s lifted again to swirl over
a broken wood fence. I don’t know why
the paper’s so important, or if anything
is even written there.
I don’t know where the dead go,
or why it’s good to forget them,
not to see them if they come crowding
the windows or trying to lay themselves down
and press along our bodies at night
and ask that we love them again,
that our sorrows include them once more.
This morning I couldn’t get up.
I slept late, I dreamed of the single
sheet of paper, which I never managed to reach
as it scumbled and soared over the grass
and a few flowers, so that I woke
with a sense of loss, wondering who
or what I had to mourn besides
my father, whom I no longer mourn,
father buried in the earth beneath grass,
beneath flowers I trample as I run.
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