Dream Where I Disobey the Meteorologist’s Appeal to Stay Indoors
By Tara Ballard
Three white-tailed deer dip their noses
and drink. A fourth stands like a sapling.
Her ears swivel like cupped palms.
Beside them, a flock of geese prepares for migration.
They wade in the water, their long necks
bobbing. This is to say, stasis is a social construction.
We have always moved, bundled our lives
across oceanscapes and stretches of land.
To claim motionlessness as human is to deny
an ordered process of normalization, is to serve
a system that behooves not those who labor.
The distance between definitions is long,
and, I admit, it is hard to see through
all this weather, but I want to believe what surrounds
could lead to more than a temporary pearling.
This mist that shapes everything intervenes:
Its thickness altering a possible act
of perception, so I recognize geese, their webbed feet
pulling through wet, but there is no sound.
The stretch of water is quiet. What silence means, then.
I am just able to make out a silhouette, squint
my eyes and sift between gradations of shadow.
My grandmother carries an armful of wood
into her living room, pushes logs into the stove
for warmth. She promised to tell me
where we come from. Before the California mountains,
before Missouri. Before her father dug graves
and her mother cleaned rooms for the wealthy.
Before the notes of passage were packed
into boxes, sealed tight against these new seasons
of fire. Our histories, she said, are shelved like books,
blanketed in dust and hard to reach, but the creek bed
remains dotted with stones, and I blur in such cloud cover,
so a sunset happens without any notice. Evidence of day
slips below the horizon, wherever that may be.
How often the light has been beyond me is a question
I have not been able to answer. Even more, a need
to identify these records of movement. I want
to read the dates and names. I want what comes
with condensation, taste the fog as it settles along my lips. Tara Ballard is a PhD student of English studying the relationship between poetry and historicity as well as race and gender politics in US-American women's poetry. Author of House of the Night Watch, her work has been published in Poetry Northwest, Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, New York Quarterly, Salamander, and elsewhere. She is an assistant poetry editor for Prairie Schooner and an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review.
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Lovely. :)
I am in bed, without power or outside light, waiting for Milton to leave our northeast coastal town, and your poem today, Tara, lifted me. Thank you for such power and beauty