Steven Schroeder | dream
Sometime between the last day of 2021 and the first day of 2022, I dreamed I had agreed (against my better judgment) to read at some sort of family gathering. In the dream, I think this odd, because no one in my family has ever asked me to write a poem or read one for a family gathering. Yet here I was, in a circle of people I thought (in the dream) must be my family, preparing to read. And then I am standing at a lectern on an edge of the circle looking at the faces in the circle realizing I do not recognize any of them and that they do not appear to be waiting for a reading to begin. They are engaged in lively overlapping conversations full of names I do not know, sharing memories I do not share, and I begin. But my voice is shaky, fading in and out so I do not know if it is in my head, silent, or out, loud, and I cannot make myself heard. And the words on the page are as unfamiliar as the faces in the circle. These are not my poems, so I feel duty bound to read them well – but I cannot make my eyes work together, so the words dance on the page and I lose my place again and again until I realize the conversations have not stopped, and I have nothing to say. And so, walking away, I do. And that is all.
And I am awake, thinking that must have been a nightmare. But it doesn’t feel like one. I have been thinking (I cannot say which side of waking this is on) of a story I heard an old friend tell. He was introducing me to an audience and he told them about a time I drove a thousand miles – as he said I’d done many times before – for a festival where many writers read, and I arrived – as he said I almost always did – a day early so we could sit and talk and have a beer. And he said he remembered that I said this is what we live for and he took “this” to mean the festival (which it seems to me would have been that not this from where we sat then and there). And I thanked him for his introduction and read for this circle of friends I knew and a few strangers I would, a family gathering. And I didn’t tell him then and I am not telling him now that he’d misunderstood because I wasn’t sure he had. What I meant by “this” in that moment was not tomorrow but today not what would be then but what was then now, not the reading or the audience listening or the stories or the poems but the circle of friends and in particular the circle of two friends that from where I sit now typing this is there and then but was here and now then and there talking about nothing in particular over a beer or something else, nothing in particular. Which is what he may have meant by saying “this” to that circle of friends to whom I had nothing to say and said it as I say it now, walking away, and that is all.
Chicago
18 February 2022
