This Dream the World Is Having About Itself

– After William Stafford

is a scalpel in the surgeon’s steady hand,
skin laid back, a hole cut in thin white skull.
The bleeding in her brain.

Through the fog of pain, confusion,
anesthesia wearing off, the world dreams
compassion in the surgeon’s eyes.

Rain drums on a canopy of leaves,
littering the yard with bruised white petals.
Her mind is a spider web snaring mist.

In the dream her mind is having about itself
I am her daughter—no—her granddaughter;
I am married to myself instead of to her son.

The kitchen is a dream.
Where do the bowls live?
How does milk pour?

She sits in a sunlit room,
the book in her hands
a dream she can’t decipher anymore.

Outside, swallows launch from the phone line
one after another, torn curtain falling,
each one tumbling alone into this dream.

Shelley Kirk-Rudeen’s poetry has been published in WA 129 (Poets of Washington), Windfall, Rock and Sling, Manzanita Quarterly, and several anthologies of Olympia, WA, poets. She draws on the natural world as well as being a mother, grandmother, wife, and friend, to inspire both poetry and daily living. Although she has retired from professional life, some of her work lives on in interpretive signage in parks and natural areas.