Marjorie Stelmach

Time and the Rain

Outside, the wind churns the bushes and rattles the screen.

Inside, the child on the playroom floor is stringing wooden beads

into a necklace. As she works, she is learning to link the sound

of rain to the warmth of her room and both to the nameless

rush of blood that deliciously shivers her skin. Her work

has begun: she’s tuning her heart to the purl of time.

Already she knows how to thread the moment just over

to the one to come. Soon will begin the harder work

of aligning the visible world with the one that vibrates

behind it unseen. The child is young. The world is stern.

The rain bears down.­­

 

The old woman’s room looks over the courtyard, its window

wide to the springtime rain. The sill is soaked, but her eyes

are weak and she doesn’t notice. She finds the song of the rain

soothing. Especially lately, when she is so often alone.

This morning, she pages through photo albums searching

for faces that fit with her memories, turning face after face

to the light, then folding them back into the dark. Some days,

she’s sure there has been a mistake, that these books belong

to someone else. Someone old. Most days, she knows

this is not the case and she must try harder. From the courtyard,

she hears the hum of machines at work on the hedges and lawns,

the steady purr of ongoing industry—such a safe sound.

Or maybe it’s raining.

Beads lie scattered on the playroom floor. The child is weary

of playing. Each bead needs her full attention, and it’s hard—

all these shapes and colors, though oddly their holes are all

the same hole. Time is teaching the child-stringing-beads

to construct her one life. Mistakes will occur, so the child

must learn, too, the difficult art of forgiving herself

for the future.

The old woman dozes over a book of somebody’s past.

The child has completed her necklace. She’s napping now.

Both will wake in a world washed clean of faces.

For a few soft moments this will not be frightening.

Then it is frightening again. Both will call out. One mother

will answer. In her room overlooking the courtyard,

the woman hears the last of the raindrops fall in a growing

silence. The sound is easeful. It seems to have come

from a long way off—her playroom, her wooden beads,

the voice of her mother. She knows she is losing the thread

of her past, but she smiles to herself. Her time on earth

has taught her the world is forgiving. She knows the world

will forgive her for going.

 

The Voice

In other people’s dreams I appear in doorways.

I always know something they should know—

lines I wrote in a poem over thirty years ago.

It was true back then. I had a gift, of sorts.

Family, friends, students, distant relatives:

You were in my dream last night, they’d tell me.

Not so much these days. With age, I’ve lost the ease

that let me move through dream worlds not my own.

As for my own dreams, they’re meagre of late

and gone before breakfast. Only twice in my life

has a dream message come.

The first time, I was nine—the year my mother died.

We were in a rowboat at night on a black lake

lashed by winds so furious I almost didn’t hear her

when she said she needed me to help her row.

I didn’t move or say a word. I knew when we capsized,

as I was sure we would, that the fault would be

entirely my own.

Gusts tore my hair, tossing it across my eyes until

I couldn’t see her at the oars. Was I in that boat alone?

But then, above the wind, I heard her voice:

Don’t worry. Nothing you do could be wrong.

That’s it. I woke. My life went on.

In the second dream, lost in a labyrinth of streets—

graffitied walls, the sound of screams, a sky

that could only mean the end of time—I heard

at my shoulder my brother’s quiet laugh

and a voice I thought I’d lost forever:

Don’t be afraid, I know the way home.

Then, Jim and the dream were gone.

 

Nothing more has come to me from the dreamworld

As for my guest appearances bearing warnings,

comfort, wise advice, they’re over now. Still, perhaps

I’ll stand one day, a ghost in a familiar room,

and a voice will say,

I had the strangest dream last night.

I don’t remember much, only how afraid I was.

 

Then a figure appeared in a doorway. I couldn’t

make out the face, but just before I woke,

 

she—it was a she—took my hand. And spoke.

I almost recognized the voice.