Maybe in the Space of Dreams
On the first anniversary of my mother’s death I dream
a long hallway of closets overflowing. She’s there,
at my shoulder complaining
that Dad has hoarded every suit he ever bought—
if he’d just clean them out, we’d have room
for everything.
I wake to dust everywhere—debris of stars
and forests, faint traces of other bodies, other lives
dull every surface of the real. Wings
pierce my reverie—
crows worry something by the hedge
while some invisible air traffic control keeps
gangs of sparrows and finches
from colliding at the feeder.
Three doves eye me from the power lines.
Evenly spaced at first, two
edge closer together till their folded wings
touch. They have the look of women
who watch me from their deaths, still curious
about my life, Nana and Aunt Mildred,
or Aunt Margie, maybe.
It’s hard to tell.
The dead prefer ambiguity, the space
of dreams. And I always fall short
of clarity—my cluttered days undusted,
unintelligible, filled with
maybe. I can’t shake off
these visitants, can’t escape clouds
of witness who won’t let go of this life,
who worry me with ghosts
of their unfinished obsessions,
with the leftover glances of their love.
*
Linda Mills Woolsey (she/her) lives in rural Western New York. Her work has appeared in The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Windhover, Wild Roof Journal, St. Katherine Review, Northern Appalachia Review and other journals.
powerful, thank you.