Pre-Inaugural Dream

Sugar weak, core and limbs
radiating with it, I woke in the
dark first hours of January 20th
having just dreamed of living
in a small mountain town,
perhaps something like Crestone,
where people stopped to talk
on dirt streets, share food, laugh,
linger near the new art installation:
two bushes whose lowest branches
were trimmed just enough
to allow us to crawl beneath
on our bellies, get caught on
a few twigs, a few leaves,
feel our breath speed,
a vague dread rise. Stuck once
or twice, I paused to notice
the beautiful tangle above,
the calculated trimming.
It was only a bush. I was small
enough to pass. I stood.
Before me were two doors.
Like exit signs, the words
WOMEN over the left,
MEN over the right.
Hard as a mannequin,
I passed through WOMEN.
On the other side, my youngest son
sat on a bench, studying leaves
he had plucked from the shrub.
Rosemary, perhaps, or sage.
I felt lucky to live in a town
where art was the place to enact
and defeat fear, not the pillow,
the walking into the day.

20 January 2017
after reading before bed, “A Trump Attack on the Arts would be More than Just Symbolic”