I find different identities for the house
I go to in my dreams, where I wake up
and wonder, worried, how to find
my way from that beloved, empty house
in the country back to my apartment
in a distant city.  Then, fully awake,
I see that I have been back all the while.

With my increasing forgetfulness
I wonder if the house I go to,
that I love without understanding it,
is the place where I will achieve
a final, complete deconstruction
of my remembered self.  I look
at the house I go to in my dreams,

and feel I am becoming a statue
molded from sand.  I don’t need
Edgar Hoover, or Edgar Allan
Poe to see that, forgetting and
remembering, I find in the house
in my dreams my true and
fitting home.  But is it my tomb?

—

James McColley Eilers. Verses, translations, essays, photographs published in Subtropics, San Francisco Reader, Modern Words,  Haight Ashbury Literary Journal; on websites, InTranslation, Poetry Ark, and Subprimal;  in the books, How to Bury a Goldfish and Imprints.  His play, Turning, was performed in San Francisco in 2001.