Classic Poem

In this dream it was evident that,
by some matter-of-fact household
miracle — commensurate
with hearing one's lost daughter
singing on an old 'Sixties tape or,
closer yet, encountering her
in a full-color-and-sound video
of last summer's reunion — com-
mensurate, but by some un-
or other-worldly multiple, more
real — she was among us, not
as in life but in life and all of us
giddy at being reminded
that of course death isn't final: people
will come back and reoccupy certain
pockets of a life that never
properly filled up! There's always
Rewind/Replay, isn't there? Of course!
We were all laughing — she too —
at how stupid we'd been to forget
so elementary, so just a thing!

I don't know how long (by dream time)
we sat there, the whole family,
planning the travels and fetes and feasts
and frolics we'd all do together,

during which she threw back her head
and inhaled and sighed with delight,
" O God, the smell of black birch!
Is it already April?"
That's
how natural it was. I recall
catching her chair when it rocked too far back.
No sense whatever that all Natural Law
hung in abeyance ...
Well? —
Say that she did come — she
or whatever of her (or any) self
persists after the body's gone:
a single quantum perhaps — the
particle sine qua non her
body had formed on, so in-
finitesimal a thing solidarity'd
anyway never existed for it —
and free now to go anywhere:
into the heart of a sapphire
or into time-past or -to come
or into a dream? ...
Either that
or name the cold numerals
of cause-and-effect by which
a mere chaos, a dream, can lo-
botomize out of a man
his common sense
his common witness
his common logic
and yet leave enough of who he is
to locate, to identify as his own
an impossible happiness.