The Moon Dream

Where she lay her head after twilight's last bittersweet caresses no one ever knew, except that as she turned with a quiet wave of her fingers they imagined she returned to a great hearth full of warm mirrors and undying toasts.

Indeed, later as her head rolls about on the pillow, her dreams fill with spirit soirées of those long gone, while the rain thrums softly on the greenery outside in a world she only pretends to know.  As she mumbles vaguely into the air above her face her outstretched hand lifts and falls and her body twists at the hips as though she is engaged in a slowly moving dance, full of grief and the strength of densely coloured memories.  About her the far-off brightness of a worried spirit hovers, swelling and subsiding with her irregular breathing, fanning the air with ripples of silver like the moonlight.  And in time it is as though the silver returns to her, empties itself still shining from the cool night air into her pores, cells, the secret sheaths of nerve and taut muscle, beyond what she could think herself to be, and slips silently into her thought and dream, through old brassy keyholes to the rooms of her soul.

There is the room of blue for sky and sea, where eagles and whales are and where freedom stops only when thought of.  The lock moves easily and if you step across the threshold, wrapped in the sight of endlessness as you would be, your unattended feet would find no floor, no choices but freedom to sea or sky, depending.  If you don't choose you will remain there at the point where earth fails to separate the two.

As the moonlight shifts over her she dreams of a thing which is nothing in her dream but a word, home.  Suddenly she is confronted with the unbroken sunlight of a Caribbean day, and looking up she loses it again, this dream of a word, into the blown night.

As we follow her softly flowing river self, we find there is the room of red, where her loves cross and re-cross, wreathing the silence with layered patterns that reinforce and sustain, and resting on them all a pile of coloured ribbon pieces, like in a dressmaker's shop.  There is a walkway here of light sculptures in glass, some of which have slid over to one side.  The glass of one or two is cracked and leaking the light in long tendrils across the walls.  Someone comes through every so often though, to clean and polish and peer.

A cloud crosses outside the window, the tree bends to the narrative of her twitching eyes as she dreams.  There is a sense that something has moved quickly about.  In her dream it occurs to her that she has lost her perspective altogether.  What used to be the horizon's stars have slipped with soft calls into a lost first hour.

A slowly progressing silver tour reveals the room of purple; here the ancients reside when they are not roaming the halls or shrieking at the musicians.  It can be a roar of a mess here.  There is an ostrich, and two or three monkeys.  The bush has straggled over the paths and often flourishes for years before being cut back again.  It is a place of wonderful smells, the sweet of cinnamon, the haunting drag of kerosene, balsamwood incense, resin, coconut oil and rain.  Here mothers nurse and the big sleek cats roam, resting only to view from a crag's edge the sight of her silver finger streaking the heavy leafed mountainside.  Here are the sighs of hope and the only shouts of joy she can remember.

The owls have begun a second circling prowl, for building ahead of the sun are many days of rain.  There is a shiver, a ripple that catches the tips of the palm fronds against the window ledge, and a furtive dog on the way to the garbage pile at the corner turns back.  The spirit of our dreamer hears from within and turns for newer valleys, not yet flooded, as day knocks.

As the silver stream turns outward, the doors to her myriad tributaries flash past, and in her wake the first syllables of so many colours are washed, blended and tossed to random soaring melodies.  Above, her curled body stretches waking to the shore, she reaches down to wet her face and sees the moon below the surface, rolling like a barrel among the pebbles.  So she slips into the flow while the sun watches from a dry spot, she calls soul of glass it is I!

There is an arc of silver droplets where she had frolicked in the morning, and a small key left by the tide.