Back in the Middle Kingdom
(for Georgia Alwan)
Do you remember me?
I dreamt of you last night.
You were there.
You were playing the flute and
carrying a dictionary.
Dreams are wonderful that way.
There was a boy who loved me then,
riding in the backseat of the station wagon
speeding through streets with Spanish names
and telephone poles
into the Venice poetry den.
They had to lower the microphone.
What do you remember?
Dropping words like beads of sweat off your nose
landing in my poem like a teardrop on a love letter.
The smell of the mimeograph machine.
We wrote underground,
in the basement of the school
behind windows that wouldn’t open
barricaded by wrought iron grid-work.
(I loved to borrow Byron’s liquid paper.)
You levitated softly in and around
our desks as we scribbled.
Not weird, different, my father explained,
practicing his Unitarian first principle.
I returned to school with the zeal of the newly converted,
my mind open, my pen flowing.
In my dream we stood face to face and you breathed peppermint into my mouth.
I inhaled, deeply, and kissed you.