Where is Everybody? (a dream)
Where is the typical little town I knew
with the dark little store
by the stone clock tower?
Had there been some hullabaloo?
Why did it seem
before I came
they had all run on,
gone home? Alone,
my gliding shadow
was all I saw.
Up from the unseen
park they come,
musicians in golden
outfits. Oh I
was happy to be
there to cheer as they
solemnly play-
ing went by,
but what if they are the enemy!
No wonder everyone else is hidden
but one unknowing and unbidden
here without motive, without reason
overwrought – because caught – in treason?
Worst of all if the residents heard
and the enemy proffered me some award!
(“Where Is Everybody?” from Momentary Dark by Margaret Avison © 2006. Published by McClelland & Stewart. Used with permission of the publisher.)
It seems here the poem is written as a verbatim description of a dream. The poet is trying to find out what the dream means by writing it out. When Margaret died, I had a very similar dream which I wrote about in a poem:
Bisque
After hearing of the death of Margaret Avison,
you have a dream. You are with her in a mountain town
she recollects from her young womanhood. You are
walking down a road. She is looking for a house – bisque-colored,
she says. (Bisque – a word that would have found favor with her.)
She once lived there.
That old town is gone, you think ... but not so much.
Some things are still there, like the big sign
for a hotel, shaped like a star. It had some words
on it. You recognize that sign;
you read about it once in her poems.
Everything is bathed in a golden light – of
a time more innocent, bygone. You think
you are traveling back in time with her
when in fact, she is leading you to the heaven
she remembers poetry was for her;
she is returning to the bisque colored house
she once lived in – she is showing you
the end of poetry, the end of a line in time.
Instead of the ‘dark little store’ and the ‘stone clock tower,’ I had in my dream a hotel and even a schoolhouse where Margaret the teacher had once taught as a young woman (which I didn’t mention as it seemed too obvious a symbol.) Like Margaret’s dream town, mine too was completely devoid of citizens. All I could see was her as a younger woman leading me up the main street to a house where she had once lived when she taught in this town. A long time ago, she had been its resident and now she was returning. I could not help but interpret the image as a return of Margaret to the ‘heaven’ she knew as a poet, the ‘heaven’ of which she or other poets could occasionally be a Star Hotel guest of, the ‘heaven’ she could teach other people about in the schoolhouse, the ‘heaven’ of which consciousness she had finally reached in death.
In “Where is Everybody?” the poet has arrived too soon to a town occupied only by ‘golden’ musicians and is afraid. But aren’t the musicians really only angels in disguise? Instead of ‘golden’ musicians, my poem had 'golden' light – that sun-buttery light that appears often as an image in Margaret’s poems.
Do poems cut across individual consciousnesses into a deeper sub-conscious that is somehow connected – a chthonic ‘small town’ as it were where one might meet a fellow sojourner? I wonder, I really do.
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