Asia’s Rain

Patron saint of peaceful passion,
graceful colors of gifted flight,
take her prayers of bliss and fashion
wings to journey through dreams tonight.

I twist to keep the wind
from freezing snow against my soul.
I flex my dreams and shards of ice
fly off my blue eternities.
She howls, the memory of my last winter,
so beautiful and cold,
reminding me of the strength
of her embrace
and how my frozen tears
could only flow
when she let go.

I hear the sun
sweep jagged clouds
outside my door
where soon will come a knock.

Come in, I’ll call,
if you are warmth.

It’s been a long time since I’ve dreamed of flying or floating or even just doing that thing where I’m running along and I fall forward and find myself skimming along the ground.  Or, there’s the one where I climbed a tree all the way to the top until it bent over and catapulted me all the way over to the top of another tree.  I also classify most swimming dreams in this same category because usually I am swimming very fast, like flying, and sometimes I actually launch up out of the water like a dolphin.  The point is, it’s been a long time, years, since I’ve had any sort of dream like this.

Over the past few years the most common re-occurring theme in my dreams is fishing.  I know it sounds innocent, but the fishing is always wrong.  I’ll be fishing in a place where you just wouldn’t expect to find anything worth fishing for, like a fountain or a shallow swamp or the grassy low ground of a freeway interchange that’s been flooded after a big storm.  Then there’s my fishing tackle; it’s all wrong too.  I’ll be fishing with those big lures with feathers all over them that are designed for catching marlins or something, not whatever lives in the wrong places where I am fishing.  Or there was the time when I had a hot dog threaded onto my hook like a big stiff worm.  Yeah, I know, it’s sexual as hell.  But maybe a hot dog is just a hot dog.  Finally, I always catch something, but whatever I catch is also wrong.  I once caught a pure white dolphin.  Another time I caught an octopus that had hair all over it.

Wrong place, wrong bait, wrong fish.  It’s kind of obvious what it adds up to:  wrong life.  Going after the wrong things in the wrong places and using the wrong approach.

Last week I was a project manager for a big software development company; next week I’m going to be a farmer.

“Two weeks notice?  We’re in the middle of an eighteen month project and you give me two weeks notice?  It’s gonna take me at least a month just to get HR to approve the paperwork for a replacement.  Six weeks to sort through résumés and do interviews.  Whoever I choose is going to want to give their employer at least four weeks notice, and then it’ll take another month to get them up to speed.  I had a boss who used to say that new people were useless for the first six months.  Took ‘em that long just to figure out where the bathrooms were.”

“Come on Dave, you know Karen is ready to step in and take over this project tomorrow.”

“You’re not leaving tomorrow.”

“Two weeks.”

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