In Dreams

After eighteen years there’s no real grief left for the man who was my father. I hardly think of him anymore, and those dreams I used to have, in which he’d be standing in a room of people I didn’t know—maybe his new friends, if the dead have friendships— those dreams no longer trouble my sleep. He’s not in the crooked houses I wander through or in the field by the highway where I’m running, chasing down some important piece of paper, desperate to reach it as it’s lifted in the wake of trucks or flattened and marked by passing cars, as it’s lifted again to swirl over a broken wood fence. I don’t know why the paper’s so important, or if anything is even written there. I don’t know where the dead go, or why it’s good to forget them, not to see them if they come crowding the windows or trying to lay themselves down and press along our bodies at night and ask that we love them again, that our sorrows include them once more. This morning I couldn’t get up. I slept late, I dreamed of the single sheet of paper, which I never managed to reach as it stuttered and soared over the grass and a few flowers, so that I woke with a sense of loss, wondering who or what I had to mourn besides my father, whom I no longer mourn, father buried in the earth beneath grass, beneath flowers I trample as I run.