Dream Houses

Dream Houses


I dream of houses:
brick mansions, cold and formal, their flagstones
clammy under bare feet even on a summer day,
white clapboard houses clinging stubbornly
to the harsh, steep granite of New England hills,
vacant cabins in the dark pine and hemlock woods,
long forgotten, mouldering away
into ancient tapestries of timber, moss and lichens,
beach homes on which the sea encroaches
like some fatal, muttering adversary.

In my dream,
the home of my early childhood becomes
a greenhouse whose foundation
sinks rapidly into the ground, while
I watch a parade go by: the elephants,
passing level with the second story,
meet me eye to eye, while around me
the glass panes of the greenhouse
tumble out to shatter on the shifting bricks
and the whole structure cracks.

The dream shifts:
I am spreading the Tarot in an open field
while the breeze lifts the cards and flips them, one by one:
the Priestess and the Hermit, the Hanged One and the Fool;
then Judgment and the Tower land in the House of Self.
The wind stops, and I see beside me
an old man with a crooked cane and an old, wise dog.
They watch my reading, curiously.

Now we all sit on my bed,
which has been planted, oddly,
in a field of flowers and long grass
overlooked by a yellow house
with a winding drive up a gentle hill -
a house which I have never seen before
and yet have always loved.

Every dream leads me to these
houses which change before my eyes.
In the moments as I wake from sleep,
I feel the earth tremble under me and know,
moving further into wakefulness,
that nothing is the same and
that nothing has prepared me
for the inescapable, tectonic change that comes.



Sarah Unsworth MacMillan
August 2009