#13 summer shards

My mother died twenty years ago this summer. She died of a heart attack in her sleep and it was a great shock. Later I came to understand it was a blessing due to her failing memory, but for months afterwards I wanted to hear from her in my dreams. When she finally appeared in a dream I was so excited I woke myself up. These days she comes to me in my dreams in her nightgown searching for candles in the loft on Sullivan Street. Or sometimes we are talking on my grandmother’s screened porch on Long Island. Last night I dreamt I was shopping for geraniums to put in her pocket to take on a plane to Heron Island in Maine. It was a hard task as the dead are difficult to shop for.

Marigold

I have the sun’s eye one minute—
the next, I’m going to bed with it.
Last night, I dreamed of rosemary,
for remembrance and for a baby

born to a woman who lived
in an apartment building. In the dream,
the dead and I said goodbye
at the door. I tried to buy a magazine

in a drugstore, but nothing was easy.
Nothing is easy when you’re shopping
for the dead. Maybe toys, I thought,
as I passed some boys playing

by the side of a road. Maybe a gold key
with which to open a coffin lid.
I woke to find none of the bodies inside
were alive outside the dream.

–Mary Jo Bang, The New Yorker, June 3, 2024, page 42