The People My Sleep Invents
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| Gabrielle Schafer |
The People My Sleep Invents
Every night the brain runs a pawnshop,
trading in old glances, bent smiles,
the dented profiles of men who once
handed my father a receipt through a slot of glass.
They come back misfiled.
A woman with the eyes of a checkout clerk
and the mouth of a saint in a painting
stands in for my mother.
A boy who once dropped a coin in a fountain
returns as my brother, taller, burning.
The mind, they say, cannot sculpt a new face.
It must steal them, like buttons from coats,
like bones from graves,
like extras wandering off the edge of old films.
So the night fills with citizens of nowhere:
the man who pumped gas in 1983,
still smelling faintly of unleaded and boredom,
now cast as my executioner, my savior, my friend.
I never learned his name.
In sleep, he learns my secrets.
They arrive wearing masks made of memory —
the bus driver’s jaw, the neighbor’s eyebrow,
the woman who once said “next” like a verdict.
They audition endlessly for meaning.
Sometimes I wonder who I am to them.
Perhaps in their own dreams I am a stranger too,
a silhouette borrowed from a waiting room,
a voice assembled from leftovers,
the man who once held a door and vanished.
We spend our lives crossing in hallways of waking,
leaving fingerprints on each other’s retinas,
stocking the warehouse of the future
with faces we will never consciously keep.
And later, when sleep opens its black theater,
when the curtain lifts on impossible cities,
we applaud the cast we never hired:
the forgotten, the ordinary, the almost-known,
risen from the archives of a glance,
standing in the footlights of the mind,
trying, like us, to remember who they are.
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I love the way you create that gallery, what a great amalgamation of impressions, strangers and people we once knew... I think I have experienced this, with chance encounters returning.
ReplyDeleteYour poem is so vivid and evocative, Chris, and I especially love the idea of a pawn shop ‘trading in old glances, bent smiles,’ and that ‘come back misfiled’, and these lines:
ReplyDelete‘The mind, they say, cannot sculpt a new face.
It must steal them, like buttons from coats,
like bones from graves,
like extras wandering off the edge of old films.’
Chris, I love your take on the dreamworld! You have a wonderful database at your disposal. If you think of each one of those bits as pieces of a puzzle, you might be able to fashion a message from Mother Night.
ReplyDeleteThis is stunning work done. I especially like; "They arrive wearing masks made of memory." Thank you so much for writing to the prompt.
ReplyDeleteLove the imagery in this. Really taken with the idea behind "Perhaps in their own dreams I am a stranger too". A pleasure to read.
ReplyDelete