Bridge Enough

Rachel Barton

              The friends have left, the sea is bare…

              And the stars are the only ships of pleasure.

                      – Elizabeth Bishop, “Song”

 

1.

 

I want more from my dream than the carpeted stairway going down then up as if it had second thoughts. I want the treatment offered by an ex-boyfriend’s brother, the artist, not just a view of his table with the blue lake of a gel pack in the middle that he obsessively smooths with his hands. I wake too soon.

 

2.

 

In another dream, I am hell-bent on taking my dead grandmother Lalia to a Bavarian restaurant, not my dead German grandmother, Agnes Heisler, but the Scotch one who grew up with dogs and horses. Of course, Agnes was from Batavia, which is more than a bit like Bavaria—am I crossing my synapses? Hard to tell in a dream.

 

3.

 

When we cross the Atlantic out of LaGuardia, we lose an engine and land in Reykjavik. Time unspools over the long wooden benches as we wait for another flight. I remember a bus ride into Copenhagen, then the hotel’s feather beds onto which we collapse. I sleep for 36 hours uninterrupted.

 

4.

 

Haricots Verts Amandine. That’s what I put in the blue glass bowl for our holiday dinner, the bowl you gave us as a wedding gift thirty years ago. I wonder—did you cook for anyone? Did you make Mom’s olive cheese balls, a pecan pie? Or are you still dining on crusty bread and painkillers? I bring you to my table in a blue bowl.