Dreaming of My Mother

Last night I dreamed of a rainbow
The deepest, most vivid, complete rainbow I have ever seen
I could see the left side and that it stretched boldly across the sky
Clouds and trees obscure it, but I know she is there
This strong, vivid reminder of a world in full color
A universe that knows how to dazzle us

My mother is in the kitchen at a sink with a window looking out
in the direction of the rainbow. The land is flat–like Kansas
in the Wizard of Oz
I desperately want her to see the rainbow.
“Look!” I say to her. Look at the rainbow.
It is so spectacular–but in my dream
I was at once filling in the blanks of what I cannot see
And living an immediate intuition of what is actually there.

We go outside, a screen door to a yard
With an old tree, maybe fallow in the winter
Maybe dead but we couldn’t part with it.
The second we get outside there are
thick grey clouds obscuring the rainbow.
There is a split second when I feel accused of something,
that I had made it up, that it was all just in my imagination.

In my dream I can feel the strength of my convictions.
The fire of knowing something to be true
And then I spot again, the solid bands of deep color
as if painted on the sky in thick flat veneer
The rainbow is definitely real.
But my mother and I can’t see it together
At once I am there all alone on that flat land,
with the tree branches like thick magic marker
spidering along the horizon, tracing and blocking my view.
The only light the moon
A Rainbow at night .
Impossible, visceral, fleeting, abiding
Like a tornado come and gone