I recollect the whole thing as clearly as if I had awoke with the sun,
Dispensing with any alarm, fully awake and engaged.
I am on a gurney being wheeled slowly down a hospital hallway
(For it is clear to that workaday hustle and bustle
Is no longer of concern to me)
Which is all silence,
Save for the squeak and bump of my carriage’s wheels
As it crosses from tile to tile,
And the sheet which covers me is seemingly made of gauze,
For I can, as I pass by one to the next,
See clearly inside each of the rooms,
The tableaus being what you might expect in such a place:
A young man and small child
Fluttering about a mother and her newborn,
A middle-aged woman reading aloud
(But softly, almost mechanically)
To an ancient and clearly unheeding man,
Another woman, aged and frail to the point of being insubstantial,
Dabbing at her eyes with a frayed, damp tissue,
Exiting a room as an orderly closes the blinds.
At this point the scenes become incongruous, almost surreal,
As if another director has suddenly assumed control of the film;
There is a room where a Marlowe-esque priest,
All harlequin-outfitted and codpiece-clad,
Bumbles drunkenly about the room,
Banging his censer against the walls as he speaks in tongues.
But just as suddenly the settings become gentle, pastoral:
In one room there are no walls at all,
Only a quiet valley with dirt roads and small streams
And the sound, disembodied but palpable and oddly familiar,
Of bells tolling faintly and melodiously in the distance,
While in the next there is nothing save
A young woman with angels bending over her.
At this point, I have clearly reached my final destination,
And I expect to find a chilly and spartan space,
Harshly lit and sparsely furnished with metallic chairs and tables,
So I am caught unawares for what awaits through the doors:
Light, just light making everything below it a toy world.
The dream abruptly ends, as they are wont to do,
But it seems I found it oddly comforting,
And it is that which makes me so apprehensive.
I originally wrote this piece a few years ago in response to a writing prompt, which required one to include two lines from another poem in the body. The lines beginning "A young woman..." and "Light, just light..." are taken from "Dippold The Optician" from Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology, which is possibly the finest poem from possibly the finest collection of poetry what was ever written.
