I dreamt my dead grandmother a few nights ago. She looked great--young, hair well done, perfect make-up, smooth skin--much the way she liked to look from time to time when she wasn’t in her house dress cooking and cleaning, or gardening. In the dream she and I were in a room together, but despite our close proximity to each other, she was avoiding my eyes. And before I remembered that she was dead (dreams have a way of making you avoid harsh realities sometimes), I was very hurt that she wouldn’t look at me. At some point in the dream I finally remembered she was dead, and that led to some understanding of her pointed refusal to look me in the eye. Now the way I began to process the dream may not make sense to some...
I figured she was probably avoiding my eyes because she wanted me to feel her presence, but she also wanted me to understand that she wasn’t there to take me with her. I am not satisfied with just that though; I know there’s more to the dream. I’ll ask my mother to help me figure it out.
If that makes sense to you, you’re probably one of those people who knows (who has concretely experienced) the truths that our dreams foretell or help us uncover about our past. And you’re most likely also a person who knows when a dead relative shows up in a dream, you have to pay attention!
It’s with that burden of knowledge that I’m reading and appreciating these lines from Tanya Shirley’s collection of poems, She Who Sleeps With Bones, today.
I’ve become an unwilling seer
who will grow old and appear
to be a shaman to the unbelievers;
a tattered woman who smells
of feculent potions.
My mother could see from the back
of her head, the enemy approaching.
. . .
water means longing;
the long buried relative visiting the living
is old dead come for new dead;
. . .
Already I know too much.
It will kill me to give this up.
_______________
Coming next Tuesday: My review of Tanya Shirley's She Who Sleeps With Bones.
