Good Night

At the delicious edge of sleep —

the doors of dream enticingly ajar

(or maybe they are more like pools

or limbs exploring towards infinity)

From that alluring edge

I’m reeled back in —

your voice, or at another time

your finger tapping —

engendering my dull reluctant rise

through layers swiftly shredding

back to here

And so my softest thing to do 

is laugh —

it shimmers with releasing ripples,

keeps my thought from coalescing solid,

allows my sleepy drift

back toward the edge …

©Wendy Mulhern

December 26, 2019

The shapes are not the light

If you brought them all together —

all the moments, from many different lives,

where the dream was broken through

and the light poured in —

You would see many different shapes —

a death, a near death, a psychedelic trip,

the answer to a prayer offered

from the very depths,

a gift of life received, the gratitude invoked —

The shapes are not the light.

Light can come through anything.

And what you do with the dream

after seeing the light

is not trivial. There is guidance

to be found, about how this is done,

guidance, and guides,

along the upward way.

©Wendy Mulhern

November 26, 2019

Dreams will be my friends

I find myself suddenly hungry

for fiction, for magic,

for peppermint mochas

in well-lighted places,

for time to get lost in a book

At the end of my dream

I found myself flying,

flapping huge wings

that started as arms,

down the dirt and gravel road 

through the woods,

back to the cabin

I stayed up late last night

reading and tending the fire

till I was too sleepy to continue.

The sleepiness returned today

before the work was over,

and the book was also calling me

We’ll go home soon,

and dreams will be my friends,

giving me story while they also

give me rest.

©Wendy Mulhern

November 10, 2019

Some Dream

This could be one dream,

could be another

(as I awoke this morning

after saying “would you like a spoon?”)

—a setting, and some people,

and the day to day familiarity

of being — nothing high stakes,

nothing too emotional,

just the exchange of words

and the exchange of gifts

A place I put myself

no more or less

than putting myself here —

in this afternoon 

of wind and trees and rest

and taking in what’s given,

taking it, and calling it what’s here.

©Wendy Mulhern

May 31, 2019

Remember

Before you go to sleep,

before you slip

into the sweet kaleidoscope

that mirrors and recombines

all you saw and felt

throughout the day

Before you turn out lights

and leave the moon

to its bright vigil 

through the night

Before releasing your thoughts

like doves

to fly to their home roosts

Remember what you are

and how it guides you

through your dreams

as well as through your day.

©Wendy Mulhern

May 15, 2019

Setting Sail

With great effort, I practice

what I don’t even try for with dreams —

that waking up and seconds later

forgetting everything, feeling the shift

into the day’s perspective,

deep sigh of steadying, reset,

to feel the flush of energy

take hold, like well filled sails,

to launch me forward in pursuits at hand

I take the effort, thus,

to reset my impressions,

my conclusions, my opinions —

on noticing the ways

they’ve boxed me in, and bent me down,

to let them go, forget them all,

and set my sails for winds of truth to fill.

©Wendy Mulhern

March 25, 2019

To my inspiration

I will trust you to be there

in the morning, after the washing clear

of all the wear lines of the day,

after dreams have danced in water-like dimension

through the fluidity that wipes it all away

Somewhere in that time

well before sunrise,

when we awake and start

our pre-departure gatherings,

I trust that you will tuck yourself

like hope, into some pocket,

to lift me, later on,

to be my dawn.

©Wendy Mulhern

March 13, 2019

After a long day

All I want to do

is close my eyes

and let the images

that wait around the edges

come rushing in,

shifting and babbling

in their strange gibberish

that will focus into some kind of sense

and tell their fleeting stories

when passing through the filters of my dreams.

©Wendy Mulhern

February 28, 2019

Falling asleep while trying to write a poem

A world made

of everything that happened,

an armature of sighs,

something seen the moment

before I opened my eyes,

not enough time

to make any difference

There may be hope

in the very slightest of things,

the gossamer of insect wings,

the care that has been taken

at every scale where things can be perceived —

we may not understand

but this may help us to believe.

©Wendy Mulhern

January 26, 2019

Unawakened

We rely on each other

and we let each other down

in small ways and in big ways

every day

We feel the crush of disappointment

but we keep on reaching out

because we think we have no choice.

Sometimes our efforts are rewarded,

if briefly

Our words and our intentions

go out like threads. They tangle,

they fall away. We try again

but often with the same results

We think we need each other

and we feel our need

is seldom satisfied.

We fall together unawakened

through the dream.

©Wendy Mulhern

December 17, 2018

A Word of Advice

If you’re too tired to find your daily poem,

don’t stay up late to read a novel —

its world will trespass on your dreams,

displace you from your peaceful center

Beware the morning, then, whose overcast

may not pierce through the web that spun you in —

you’ll sit in stupor trying to remember

what gives your life its lift, how to begin …

But if you find yourself in this condition,

it’s folly to succumb to doleful doubt —

you have an easy, obvious solution —

even a silly poem can pull you out.

©Wendy Mulhern

July 19, 2018

Acquittal

This is not incremental change,

not resolutions, not a trajectory,

not a thing to chart and measure progress

and feel good today, or else feel bad

This is the dropping of everything —

unholy mess, colosal clatter —

this is the shock of light occasioning

complete disjunction from what went before

This is the calm beyond the conflagration

where you find out it never really mattered,

this is the waking up after your dream

where morning’s truth provides your sure defense.

©Wendy Mulhern

July 12, 2018

Dream Light

Where does the light in dreams come from,

here in the dark woods, in the dark cabin,

when rain is falling on the metal roof

and all the lamps are out?

How is it that I can know you in the dream

when I don’t really see you,

when we’re conversing

while both looking at the same object?

What is presence anyway,

and what is absence?

How do we see each other,

how are we seen?

This world is more mysterious

than I imagined, and vaster,

since it also houses the realm of dreams.

©Wendy Mulhern

June 10, 2018

Clean

In my loved communion

with hot water at end of day,

I think of this melting

and the next one

(as sight and feeling

drift into dream)

the necessary daily dropping

of all the contexts

that seemed so fixed

and so important,

to let the sweet unburdened

energy of being

once again assert its rightful place.

©Wendy Mulhern

March 1, 2018

The edge before sleep

In the view behind my eyelids

everyone kept walking through

with marked purpose.

They made stories for themselves

out of the ambient sound

It didn’t take long

for me to drift away

nor yet to jolt back

like falling off a cliff

awakeness catching me

just enough to set me down

When there is nothing new

in what the day has to report

there is always the allure

of the edge before sleep

and thought’s opening

to the vast expanse of dream.

©Wendy Mulhern

January 28, 2018

Fringe of Day

Over the edge and down

into the suspended space,

the color — rings of shifting brown,

a lazy torus rolling, drifting outwards

This is a picture

of where I landed

after a day in which I wondered

what I had done in it,

how my work had seemed so short

and why I was so tired

I had to acknowledge

there were no real thoughts there —

just images,

and a desire for sleep.

©Wendy Mulhern

January 14, 2018

Mindful

Put your mind

in a place where it will dream,

let it be a wide open space

You will have, after all,

all the freedom you give yourself,

you will be able to get around

the things you stumbled on before

Let your dreams be teachers —

Even if you don’t remember

where you were,

you may be able to bring back

a way of understanding,

you may bring back

the potent calm you walked in.

©Wendy Mulhern

January 7, 2018

Imagine

What if we discovered

we’d been, all this time,

strung up in nets,

our juices harnessed

to do things we would always sense

were sideways to our desires,

so that we felt the shadow

of regret, of disappointment

dogging our every act

If we should learn

this is not our purpose,

this is not our true companion –

we are not designed

to do things that always

cause somebody pain

If we could feel

our energies released

from those old nets,

slipping through like bars of light,

gaining strength and brightness

with their freedom

What joy, what power

we would wield! slicing away

everything unmerciful, unkind,

gathering the clan of all of us

into our rightful, foreordained design.

©Wendy Mulhern

November 7, 2017

Translated

I got caught like a moth

between the folds of illusion

and the real light, and I thought

I was working the solution

but it was just a dream

running parallel to the truth

but without its power

Let me take the time to wake up.

It won’t seem like the story I’m imagining

but I will be lifted and straightened

from within, I will be infused

with new understanding.

I will not roll down the great conveyor belt

towards death. I will be translated,

I will walk free.

©Wendy Mulhern

October 17, 2017

Arriving

Dozing into the arrival

at our land, passing between

cliffs of clouds and blue banked sky,

needed desired rain

and needed desired sun

and the question of which

would attend our arrival

Eyes closed, the landscape still rolled out,

the narration borrowed

from some other world:

“They grasped each other 

by their suppositions,”

I heard, before opening my eyes

The sun shone through the rain,

mist rose up from the road

and blew across. The dream

was also worth watching

after the long trundle,

blurring the question

of where, exactly,

we were arriving.

©Wendy Mulhern

September 18, 2017