How It Seems

for Raphael Boguslav, d. July 18, 2010

I wonder if the purpose of our dreams
is to rehearse us for what seems
to be the final moment of a life.
I say “what seems” because I’ve watched

while people die: they do not look as if
they worry, as they lie there, and when
finally the moment comes when breath
desists, it doesn’t seem to me

that what existed or exists has much
to do with any grand cessation
of sensation. Nothing happens in that
instant of a liminality between what’s

living and what ends: no violence –
not even silence, really, since the riffles
of the air outside the window, and the radio
beyond the bed and ringing telephone

convene to buoy up the scene
as if there weren’t any death at all.
What left? What stays behind? I wonder
if our dreams have not been telling

us there is no time. And if, inside their
nightly instants of a liminality, resides
eternity. No one dies in dreams.
Anyway, today, that’s how it seems.

.