We know the dead inhabit our dreams.
My aunt, for instance, resides
in a dark cloud of my sleep.
When she steps out, star
of her own little play,
I barely make out her face,
and her words are nonsense,
or she speaks in the old German tongue.
Then I strain to know what she's saying,
like stretching for an apple
too far up the tree.
So I end up talking to her, begging
for more of her visits,
asking if she remembers that
midnight trip to Big Bear lake;
or my teasing her about how
she would snitch raw hamburger
from its white butcher's wrap in the frig.
"Oh, Pauline," I'd say, "You could die from that!"
When she died too soon at seventy,
the whole of her body was stooped and small.
But when she visits me, she is tall
and gray-eyed, her face snapping with light,
her diminutive high-arched feet
strapped into the three inch heels
she had loved to wear. She's piloting
her little car up the San Bernardino
mountains, reckless as the serpentine
curves. And then she stops
at the peak, balances on the brink,
her laugh riddled with mischief,
her ringed fingers sweeping the air
to show me the world.
Barbara Hendryson's poetry has appeared in over one hundred literary journals and anthologies, including The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Montserrat Review, Bellingham Review, Coracle, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Drunken Boat, Speculon, and Into The Teeth of the Wind; as well as anthologies from Queen of Swords Press, Beacon Press, Grayson Books, and Mariposa Books. Her poetry recently won first prize in the Pen American Women's 2002 poetry competition. Also in 2002, she was awarded a literary artist's grant from the Peninsula Community Foundation. In addition, she has previously received awards from the Chester H. Jones Foundation, Bellingham Review, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Kalliope, and was first-place winner of the Gloucester (NJ) Poetry Center National Poetry Competition judged by Katha Pollit, et al. Her latest chapbook, Luminosity, will be released this year by Finishing Line Press. She recently served on the advisory board of the New England Writers and lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
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