Rising Dream Tide

Rising dream tide


by Bob Hicok


Three times she bit the Atlantic
but only once barked at thunder.
Lonely thunder and now her teeth-marks float to sea.
This is her first trip to how Ocracoke Island smells
and the ocean, I’ll count my encounters
with the wide, ineffable appetite as I go to bed,
with the factory of liquid fold and unfold,
there was Kittery in the morning
and the tent-eating tide,
the naked bland Greek crotches of Sfakia.
My dog is realizing she doesn’t like salt water, I
that a spiritual person could see angels
in white winged waves, just as another might think
of beer. Drunken angels abound.
I had an actual dream last night, not a, to loosen
the imaginative stops, I need to invite Carl Jung
into the poem kind of dream, but my father and I
and other men tried to save a crop that was probably
just suburban crewcut lawn grass. I didn’t know
what to do and bleated questions until my father
said that asking was rude.
Which is when I tried to kill him,
kill the idea that to not know but want to,
that to ask, to form the voice into waves
flowing out from mind, was wrong,
and couldn’t kill him because when I tried to lift
so I could smash him down, he was heavy
as Icarus falling and I woke to the sense
of a shape breathing the darkness
of the room. I drove eleven hours to remember
only the second dream in my life.
A few feet to my right,
a ghost crab pitches sand from a hole, its eyes
on stalks above its sideways life. Sanderlings
skitter wet sand and with their long bills,
probe for small crustaceans, I dug one out yesterday
as water trickled home, sunlight ballrooming
on its shattering surface, the creature was white
and writhed, the size of what I pick from my navel
at the end of the day. My first thought was that
I needed a name, a sound to wrap around the image,
to which I’d attach other breaths, breaths of how
it lives and what it eats,
and immediately wanted to know nothing
except how it felt on my skin, the smallest kiss
to ever cross my fingerprint. Eleven hours
to close my eyes and have them turn around.
At this rate, I’ll recall one more dream before I die.
In the distance, black triangles surface
and submerge, dolphins crossing the horizon
like the teeth of a saw cutting this ocean
from an ocean that has asked
to sail away.



Published in Ploughshares