Adelaide B. Shaw

Another World

Where do we go when we dream? Do we enter another world of unexplainable time, where past and present mingle?

There is pleasure in seeing loved ones no longer alive, nostalgia and amazement in visiting places from my childhood.

summer porches
the nightly click of glasses
and neighborly talk

There is fear and anxiety as events unfold not as they happened, but jumbled and disastrous. Failure in school, missing the last bus at midnight, driving alone and hopelessly lost on a dark road, an intruder in the house. There is confusion when I appear as an adult with husband and family in my hometown. No one has died and the neighborhood is the same, only I have changed. What does it mean when I must walk in the ocean to reach my destination, drive along a road with a steep precipice on either side, walk barefoot and coatless in snow or climb mountains of mud? Where am I? Where do I go?

the trip back
on a foggy road
remembering nothing