Richard Louis Ray: A Place for Dreamers

A Place for Dreamers

Houses lose their dreamers. A man and a woman

move into a dream and change the wallpaper,

sand the floors, stain it with their sex and sweat.

They leave the picture of the nun on the wall, paper

around it, ponder her name as they learn the house's

creaks and groans, the sag in the roof from the tree

that stumps the yard. The slump in the corner where

the sinkhole began to nibble. He drives a Cadillac,

had it restored, the year of his birth, sings the song

"if it's the last thing I do," knows to tread gently

when his wife says stop, on the road or in bed.

Come Sunday mornings, or when the walls begin

to shadow the soul, they head for the hills, wander

amongst redwoods without speaking for hours.

The windchimes, when they get home, murmur

like the ghosts of nymphs wishing them luck

in the dream they weave, luck in the dream

that weaves them.

--Richard Louis Ray

in response to the following prompt:

We buy ugly houses. A nun in a rusty
Cadillac blows past a stop sign. Sunday

morning in the Richmond. My window
is a watercolor, the ringing of blue bells.*

"A Place for Dreamers" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Feel free to sample, remix, or respond to this poem, or the original prompt, and submit to glenncbach (at) gmail (dot) com to be considered for inclusion in the May 2014 edition of Truck.

*Prompt includes texts sampled from Glenn Bach, Helen Frosi, John Kannenberg, and Marc Weidenbaum.