DREAMING OF THE DEAD

DREAMING OF THE DEAD

On frozen winter nights like these
the dead dare to visit my dreams.
They come unexpectedly, uninvited,
in the cold unconscious hours
that we share. Their distant voices whisper
with the wind in the treetops
and although I cannot distinguish the words,
the plaintive sounds resonate
with gentle implications of love.

In these helplessly dark, bitterly cold hours
I shiver in my sightless room and lonely bed,
pulling the covers more closely around me
as if this fragile oasis can expunge distant
memories
and afford protection from the harsh reality
of dreams.

My mother is among those visiting ghosts:
always patient, always attentive -
an enduring anchor of undaunted stability
in my vast sea of chaos.
I talk to her
and she listens as she has always listened
unfailingly and unselfishly bearing my
anguish
and cradling the remnants of my tattered
soul.

Friends that I knew in an extinct existence
crowd greedily towards my nocturnal
emptiness,
whispering in breathless reassurance
that I have not been forgotten,
that the past we once shared is an
inevitable future,
as accessible as a promised dawn of spring
which will illuminate the last dark page of
winter.

A lover I once knew more intimately than 

myself 

returns in a restless wind-driven canticle
singing with such sweetness of remembrance
that the unsuspecting howl of this frostdusted night
is momentarily suspended.
I remember the reassuring breath of eternal
devotion
as I drank deeply from our well of urgent
kisses -
as if my tongue could silence the trembling
lips
that yearned to perpetuate rumors of
impending death.

My slumber is as soft
and innocent as newly fallen snow.
My dreams are suspended in
the exasperating fallibility
of mortal impatience.
In time, the voices of wind-driven ghosts
rise to wails of desperation,

rattling vulnerable windows
clawing against the impenetrability
of ice-glazed panes of glass.

Jon V.

from Love Letters to Ghosts