We spend half our lives in the dreamworld, and this week’s contributors visit that rich land:

“(already seen)” by Laura Pendell, a haunting poem about dream visits from dead loved ones

“Hell Machine” by Mark Joseph Kiewlak, a poem about a disturbing recurring dream 

“Fish Feeding Dream” by Michael Estabrook, a poem where pet care takes on a nightly urgency

“Frogman” by Jon Pearson, a story that uses dreamlike imagery to get inside a childhood obsession

When I was little and little was in my bones, something I could feel and know, something simple and miraculous as stars or fresh dirt, I would stand in the shallows of the San Lorenzo Creek in Santa Cruz and watch the water glide by. It smelled eerie and loud as if long-ago Indians were at the bottom making a ruckus, and the water smelled like shouting. I just knew Indians had something to do with water, the dark cool of it and the smell of it. I wanted as a kid to breathe the water, except I knew I would drown if I did. I sort of wanted to drown, too, though. It might be worth it just to smell the mystery of water. I tried several times to almost touch my nose to the surface and breathe in. It smelled white, the water. Water was life and water was death, and there was only a thread of a line between the two, which you didn’t want to cross, except I wondered what it would be like to be dead. I wondered if angels had wings and if I could then fly and if it would all happen suddenly in a blink and if everything would then be in different colors and if there might be a greater number of colors and tastes and shapes and if I could watch my parents from above and if I could go all invisible and be anywhere or everywhere at once. I was seven then and all alone and thinking about breathing water.

There was a bend in the creek and the water wheeled by dumb and deep, green in the middle, almost black, and clear at the edges where I stood thinking. But it wasn’t dumb at all. It was about the smartest thing I ever saw, because it knew the secret of life and the secret of death; and it wasn’t talking. It had a kind of Indian silence. Which made me want to, quick, dunk my head under and just see about good old death, except then maybe things would go all gray. And I loved the color yellow too much; it seemed a kind of miracle color to me; and I couldn’t take the chance. I also loved how sunlight frickle-frackled all white on the water and how the green wood stairs up to our cabin felt all hot and solid on my bare feet. So, I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to find out what it would be like.  

And once, while I stood in the shallows, this orange crayfish came hobbling toward me, like some severed hand trying to walk, this little ugly nightmarish contraption of a thing with eyes and whiskers and claws wobbling along. I didn’t go in the water for a long time after that, and then when I did, I lost one of my flippers, one of my Frankie the Frogman flippers — this blue rubber flipper that, in the inside heel, had a little cartoon picture of a frog in a frogman suit, and the frog was named Frankie and he had a sort of pot belly and frog legs that reminded me of my father whose name was Frankie or Frank and he had a pot belly and frog legs. Except Frankie the Frogman looked forever happy standing there waving, whereas my father was lonely, like a river is lonely, and I knew that in the black-green depths of myself. My father never, ever came with us to the cabin, ever. He might as well have been locked out or thrown away. It was always my grandparents or mother who took us.  

So, somewhere in my mind, I had lost my father in the deep, dark San Lorenzo Creek, my actual father. People would say, “No, you didn’t. You lost a stupid little rubber flipper. Don’t be silly.”  But I knew they were wrong. I knew my mind was water and there were places below the surface that no one wanted to dunk their heads, where the unspoken truths of things were, maybe like crayfish. I couldn’t sleep then because lying in bed on the screened-in porch with the water smashing over the dam all night long, I pictured my father lying at the bottom of the river, and I had to go save him. I had to get up in the pitch black when everyone was sleeping and feel my way down the green wood stairs and along the sand and into the ice-cold water to save my father, who was at the bottom. I was little, a little boy then, and people thought little was one thing but they were wrong. Little was a thousand things, and only I could save my father. 

In this damn recurring dream
I have a fish tank an elaborate fish tank
(I don’t really, in real life have any fish tanks,
when I was a child I did, with guppies and
goldfish, black mollies and catfish,
but that was another time, another era)
a big tank, 50, 80 gallons, maybe bigger,
with plants and colored rocks,
ceramic bubblers and some large beautiful fish,
serene fish, floating along in the water,
angelfish and zebras, neon tetras
and sucker-mouths stuck to the sides.
But in this dream I keep forgetting to feed them,
I don’t remember feeding them for weeks,
yet miraculously they are all still alive,
but droopy and hungry, and I can’t
find the food and I keep getting distracted
and I should go out and buy some food,
I should feed them, I must feed them,
I’m trying to feed them, I am their god after all,
if I don’t feed them they will perish.
But I never get to it, and always fail,
wake up with these poor fish unfed and hungry.

Yellow ribbons unspool, disappearing 
with the curvature of the Earth.
I eat yellow ribbons.
The road is gobbled up before me.
I drive these roads only at night.
It is always night.
Hubcaps dance, spiral-spinning.
Tires scribble rubber-black meaningless symbols,
translatable only from heaven’s perspective.
Cliffsides hold back empty air,
lest it rush in vaporous waterfalls to my mad lungs,
drowning me dry.
A lone shrub marks a passage
through shiny gray guardrail taffy-twisted.
Drunk at the top; sober by the bottom.
Time is a window in a very high office building
through which we are all falling
down.
Starshine on a caterpillar patrolling 
the speed-sharpened metal.
A box to die in.
Airbags — eternity’s pillow.
Two million miles of asphalt.
I can’t find my crash.
She found hers; mine eludes me.
We set off trunk to trunk down opposite roads.
Like the birth of the universe,
she lasted three minutes.
I grip the wheel barely at all; 
pay no mind to jackrabbits,
nor they to jackasses.
The car keeps itself on the road.
The car is a hell machine.
The car is my home.

Till the roads are no more.

it’s hard for me when my dead return
in my dreams vibrant, healthy not knowing
they’re already gone or perhaps it’s me
who’s made the jump, done the traveling,
challenged the dimensions, gone to the spirit world
where it’s like how I imagined déjà vu when I was
seven years old
another complete universe
all of us on Mars
just one second ahead of
all of us on Earth
and sometimes a slippage
a leaking from the container
too full to hold it all

While many people spend every working day dreaming of retirement, upon actually retiring, they may discover new challenges. This week our contributors explore the mixed feelings that can arise:

“Old Man” by Michael Lee Johnson, a portrait in poem form of a senior writer at his beachfront home. 

“Retirement” by Gwendolyn Jensen, a poem about the feelings of uselessness that can accompany retirement. 

“Retirement: Phase II” by Susan Knox, an essay about the way retirement can change a marriage. 

At age seventy and after thirty-six years of marriage, I am in a new relationship. He’s seventy-three, tall, lean, intelligent, curious, and kind. He’s got boyish charm, and when he laughs, his blue eyes sparkle. We share a love of good food and wine; we enjoy the theater, dance, jazz, college basketball, chamber music, and movies. We’re solitary types, readers, and we can be quiet together.

My new love is my old husband, Weldon, and since his retirement four years ago, we’ve been redefining our relationship. It hasn’t been easy, and the challenge took me by surprise. When Weldon decided to leave his job as executive vice president at the University of Washington, I was concerned about his adjustment and encouraged counseling before he retired. He took my advice and spent a year working through possible retirement issues. It didn’t occur to me that I might need some counseling or that couples’ sessions would be beneficial. 

Throughout our married life we had spent most of our waking hours apart. We worked long hours. I had a financial planning and tax practice that absorbed a lot of my energy. Weldon held a series of demanding positions in higher education administration and was active in national organizations. When we had blocks of time together, we were traveling or doing something fun like going to the movies or taking in a basketball game. Nothing prepared me for concentrated time together, day after day after day. Now it felt like we were newlyweds getting to know each other without the excitement of fresh love. This was no honeymoon.

When we moved to Eugene, Oregon, from Columbus, Ohio, in 1990, I sold my accounting practice and took on full responsibility for running our household. I managed everything and answered to no one. Weldon was busy and left it all to me. I should have known my husband would want involvement in our daily life when he retired. After all, he was trading responsibility for, among other things, millions of square footage of real estate and thousands of people at the university, for a 1,600-square-foot condominium and me. I should have realized that what I labeled as infringement on my territory was his desire to be useful.

Weldon had a lot of questions. Weldon likes to say that he looks at the big picture, and that’s true, but he’s very interested in details. He wanted the particulars on our daily life: my schedule, menu planning, laundry products, grocery shopping, repair people, window washers, carpet cleaners, housepainters, newspaper deliveries, mail delivery, the dry cleaner, cable TV repair, bill paying, bank relationships, investments, portfolio management. Now I was getting grilled on tasks I had been doing without interference for the last eighteen years. Daily life together needed so much coordination, so much explanation.

A few months after Weldon retired, I ordered new carpeting for our condominium. The carpet layers wanted the unit cleared so they could work quickly. I planned to clean out the desks and cabinets and pack the contents in boxes so the furniture could be easily moved.

Then Weldon got involved.

“Susan, how long do you think it will take to pack up?”

“I don’t know, maybe two days.”

“You’ll never get it done that fast.”

I should have reminded him that I unpacked all the moving boxes, including 3,000 books, in less than a week when we moved from Eugene to Seattle, and this job was miniscule by comparison. Instead, I acquiesced. After all, I was fifteen years older and maybe it would be easier to hire someone, so I found two women who specialize in this task. I scheduled movers to take our furniture to a rented storage unit while the carpet people did their job. Weldon insisted on knowing exactly what everyone would do and when they would do it. He said, “I need the details. I need to know everything.” He was quivering as he said this as though he was frustrated at not being in charge.

He had woven out a net, had woven it          
    with the measure of his touch and tongue,
    loose, exuberant, he had thrown it
    out upon the width of day, had flung it
    forth, had given to his time a tongue,
    had worked had lived largely on this earth;
    his emblems now are gone, his songs are sung,
    the children of his listening. He is a songbird
    caught in a net, its head hung down,
a stranger murmuring to himself, turbulent, unheard.

Old man in a near empty house
bridge port to the sea—
(mortgage foreclosure assured)
late in his payments to life,
sits in a lavender lawn chair
meant for picnics or poor people—
pillows stuffed under his bum
like layers of sponge cake.
He sits at a handmade wooden desk
he forged with his own hands
finished in lacquer with the edges
of his fingers tips.
He types prismatic words
forced together like a jagged
Japanese poem or something
resembling a Haiku forgery—
while 2 Persian cats,
Tambala and Shebelle,
meow constantly with passion
with pain, with hunger—
bowls empty, food dried, gone—
lying on the other side of the room.
Old man in a near empty house
bridge port to the sea,
buried in ivy near the sea
where no one ever goes,
when you expect them to.

Hear and see the poet reading “Old Man.”

In recognition of Mother’s Day, which is coming up on Sunday, May 12, this week we are featuring a range of pieces about mothers and motherhood:

“Nymph in the Bathtub,” an essay by Lynne Huffer, delves into the mixed emotions of a daughter whose mother is dealing with a medical problem.

“Nature’s New Generation,” a flash-humor piece by Jennifer A. Powers, delivers a clever punch line.

“Mother Psalm 3,” a poem by Rachel Barenblat, contemplates the experience of a baby in the womb.

“Choking Up,” a short story by Melissa Pheterson, shows how mothering habits can be passed down from generation to generation.

“Multiplication,” a short story by Kate Baggott, tells the story about how one mother of two re-discovered her creative life.

“If…Dog…Rabbit,” a poem by Marilyn Ringer, depicts the all-too-common fears of mothers when children assert their independence.