Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
I dreamed a dream of a little brown
adobe taqueria down near the beach
with an oven built into its curving
walls where they roasted the chilies and
skewered the corn on the cob. The breeze
was blowing in the dune grass and the terns cried
as they spiraled through skies of china blue.
Down the slopes the savage seas were sloshing
in soupy grays and blowing spume,
but the smells of roasting chilies and corn
fixed us in that place, and the tastes
of small delectables kept our bellies warm ‑‑
until I woke up.
This is a superb description with a masterful intermixture of good old decorum, heartfelt emotion of nostalgia and dreams, a sort of Utopian vision spun on an odd day at an odd hour, emerging quite out of the China blue of a lost and desperate conscious submerged and half-drowning in the midst of the frothy, spuming, hissing, choppy, vehement and multidimensional wave-web of relentless realities buffeting the weathered and mangled cliff of our own sweet sanity. The ending is a bit hackneyed though, sort of a plunge into the old tradition of incessant dream vision combined and recombined with minimal twists and a great dose of devilish ennui aka Chaucer and so on- conventions that are well suited for their time and place and recognized for their traits but ah- ever trite in the age where convention is just another word for nauseating mustiness and a despairingly dwindling resource of the creative. But this only by the by- the ending makes sense and fails to undermine the resonant beauty of the rest.
ReplyDeletewell, the ending is a little abrupt; unfortunately, that is the point at which i did wake up. . . .nonfiction, mostly.
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