Sunday, May 4, 2014

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.
 

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