WHERE DOES A PERSON WITH APHANTASIA DREAM OF GOING?
My son asks me how can I run the same
mile-long loops through the woods every day
and not be bored and I tell him it’s different—
every time. The sun angles through the trees
in changing ways. The undersides of the leaves
shudder to the breeze much as a lover’s kiss
differs from the next and the next. Shadows dapple
the path in new ways with each step and I know
the route but not the way until I walk it. Sometimes
the creek wafts the gaseous smell of heron dung, sometimes
it’s the reek of rotting scum, sometimes it’s the faint taste
of the sea. Often I hear the water wash over the rocks
like little bells, other times it sluices like a million million mothers
whispering shush. There are portals in the heat of summer
when a pocket of cool air comes up from the bottoms
like a great refrigerator door that I stand before.
How could anyone dream this—this moment on this path
with my foot suspended right before it falls, this definitive minute
closer to my death? And who wouldn’t want to visit this
very point in time, this infinitesimal instant when
there is no pain, this instant between two others I know
I share with you dear reader. Maybe you too saw that single
dewdrop cling to the tip of the blade of grass, the lone bee
foraging the one white clover that did not succumb
to weed killer? I don’t recall your name or face
but I know this about you: If you are reading this,
you will hear this click. And I will take this one more
breath. Then this. Then …
And you will hear the word “this.”
—from Prompt Poem of the Month
June 2024
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Prompt: Write a poem set in a place you’ve always dreamed of going to but never have. Allude to all the basic senses. Note from the series editor, Katie Dozier: “When one cultivates the practice of writing poetry, the world can reveal itself in ways it never had before. When I first heard Dick read this poem on the Prompt Lines of the Rattlecast, we were taken along for his morning run in such detail that we could almost hear our own footsteps pounding in his woods. And like any good journey, I was surprised by the last turn, in this case towards a bold, fourth-wall-breaking ars poetica. Aren’t we, as poets, always running towards a poem?”
