The Corduroy Mtn. Flagpole Dream in December William Doreski    The sky and earth make one shade of gray that sinks in like the news of a parent's death. My dream life woke me early. I attempted to erect three flagpoles, suitably Freudian, so I might fly the flags of Canada, the UK, the US. Proprietor of a guest-laden mansion perched atop a bluff overlooking a sun-streaked wash. I let the pride of ownership enlarge in me to include the entire view out to sea. If I could raise those flagpoles I'd inspire the allegiance of trees and rocks and brisk little whitecaps, but someone had bent the prongs at the foot of each pole, prongs that fit holes in small cement footings. Even in my dream I laughed at this phallic failure, so crude Aristotle would excise it from his study of the drama as unsubtle, lascivious, crude. Now in the unkempt waking world I use the winter dawn as mirror not of mood but of erasure, that casual dismissal of lives more poignant and directed than this. How can I nail one fact to the next except with vulgar instruments? Pity flagpoles lying flat on the lawn, pity the monochrome winter landscape, tabula rasa of the last forty years languishing in memory, the coldest but most orderly of abstractions, loyal to anything but the self. previous | next Added to The Corduroy Mtn. on November the Nineteenth in the year Two Thousand and Nine.