CRIME SCENE
I woke in a sweat, Dr. Edward's voice at my ear:
"The old woman's blue scarf, the toll taker's cough,
The shark-gilled clouds that somehow doomed
your eighth birthday party, not to mention Steve Reeves
in the dubbed sword-and-sandal Giant of Marathon
the summer you broke your arm . . . . The unconscious
remains constantly awake, like an unmanned camera
stocked with reels and left running, seizing 10,000
details an hour. In the psyche's endless warehouse
rack upon rack the stored images and sounds stand
catalogued and waiting, ready to depict the dreamer's
each half-thought and shade of feeling. Close your eyes
and the sleeping brain thinks nothing of assembling
Xerxes' army, setting them all moving toward a complex
private destiny, every soldier with a name and dialogue
spoken with distinct expressions and gestures, waving
hands whose palms bear a pattern of lines. See your father
at 40, wearing a bronze helmet and a face guard with slits
for the eyes, and the purple feather falling at an angle,
showing the wind has shifted. And a molded, polished
leather breastplate embossed with an open-beaked
spread-winged eagle as a silver-tipped arrow whizzes
and pierces his chest and later, after the 10-year battle,
you say goodbye through the flames of his driftwood
pyre-" I lay back in the morning light, watching dust
motes circle the room's stale air. On each sunlit speck
an ant-like army lined miles of parapet while Helen
stood alone at the tower's balustrade. I hated dreams
with a cast of thousands, the last wheel spoke and sword
hilt and epaulet real as in a museum's miniature display
rendered out of painted matchsticks and bits of cloth,
so you grew dizzy, drawn down into the toy world.
Staring at a spiraled knot-hole like a tornado's eye
I remembered once I'd read in National Geographic
about the emperor who built the Great Wall, who burned
all the books and records to start Time over, to begin
Year One with the day of his birth. Anyone with a book
was put to work for life on the Wall. The tyrant ordered
a full-sized army of statues buried with him, no molds,
each soldier and horse distinct, different from the rest.
And an underground palace-tomb, a duplicate
of his kingdom, with servants and courtesans, hills
and forests, liquid mercury for the rivers. As a boy
I studied for days a magazine photo of Pompei,
four men turned to stone when the scalding mud
and ash from erupting Vesuvius instantly encased them.
The rich man had killed two robbers, a sword clutched
in his hand. The third assailant stabbed the householder,
then ran for the door with a sack of gold, before the sky
fell and in mid-stride the eager-faced thief was caught
forever at the scene, like a wasp in amber with no alibi.
