Cenotes & Dreams

Cenotes & Dreams

(“The sun will no longer be your light during the day, nor will the brightness of the moon give you light, but the Lord will be your everlasting light. Your God will be your glory.” Isaiah 60:19)

There are darkened dreams in the depths
of us like
cenotes in the Yucatan.
We dive until our oxygen runs out,
our eyes unmasked see forms and shadows,
and we awake to misinterpret them.
We saunter halfway through our day
trying to remember at noontime
the swirling plot from midnight. We make
sense
of so little during the day.

Sometimes we compose our own understanding,
we narrate the dialogue, but never write it down.
We practice it well into the afternoon until it
morphs into something
that sounds like the first song we heard
on the radio, the first song of the summer,
and interpret it until evening.

We pass it around like pieces of pie,
we insist we have salvaged the story from the
bottom of our muddy dream.
It becomes our banner. It is wrapped around
every breath like Christmas bows until
it defines us like labels on
tin cans full of vegetables.

And when we hear only silence,
(may the reader beware)
we pretend we have heard announcements
from the sky.

We take to our blankets, close our eyes,
ache for rest,
while meaning slips through our fingers.
Perhaps the snow will cover everything
we thought we knew. Perhaps tomorrow
will be a day
without shadows. Perhaps we will see
the unseeable then.