If a Person Visits Someone in a Dream, in Some Cultures the Dreamer Thanks Them

← v8n1, Spring 2009

—for Reginald Shepherd

Dear Reginald,

It is morning.

I sit at a table

writing a letter

with a needle and thread.

I pricked my finger A pelican

out of her migratory path,

even her language family—

whose child is gone

yet she absently pecks at her breast.

I write on the bedspread

I am making for you there

May you breathe deeply and easily.

If a person visits someone in a dream,

in some cultures the dreamer thanks them in the morning

for visiting their dream.

I call it dream

not that I am drawn to that which withdraws

but to him pearled, asleep, who never withdraws.

At a hotel in another star. The rooms were cold and damp, we were both at the desk at midnight asking if they had any heaters. They had one heater. You are ill. Please take it. Thank you for visiting my dream.

Can you breathe all right?

Break the glass shout

and break the glass force the room

break the thread Open

the music behind the glass.

grief illness friendship memory

Jean Valentine

Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her BA from Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker (Yale University Press, 1965). Her tenth and most recent book of poetry is Little Boat (Wesleyan University Press, 2007). Her previous collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003 (Wesleyan, 2004), was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Lucy , her new chapbook, is just out from Sarabande Books. Valentine has received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and awards from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.