The Dream

Last night, all night the dream, the dead mother, my small sister, tiny, her mouth over my shoulder (screaming) like a knapsack when she heard the news, & my brother playing the stereo. I howled like the coyotes; myself. & saw the light outside below the window, my mother, young, playing with me at a rock, in some sunlight falling over us. I was small. An old & famous woman asked her questions: Who wrote this dream? I wanted to know. My brother thought it was our mother who wrote it when she was old. She did not die, he thought. But I knew, & called down to the cotton-head of her then, when she could not see or hear me. She would never hear me. I was not capable of talking then, yet, & she had died, after all, & the mother I call to tell the dream will not remember, after all she was not born then, yet, & needed the first mother to die before she could use her name & feed her children.