Buffalo Part I (Deborah)

by Deborah Maier

I

I had a waking nightmare.
I thought all children did.
Perceptual mysteries
History-fed
My personal waking nightmare

Mine visited me in moments
When teachers’ mindfulness flagged
When pacing and strategies came unmoored
On waves of droning complacency
Mine visited me at such moments.

I could tell when it was coming
When the teacher glid slowly away
Wrong-end-of-a-telescope further away
Shrinking and talking, mouth flapping and shrinking
I knew then my nightmare was coming.

I’d focus my eyes first to stop it then not
For sometimes I thought I would never come back
But would pull through a membrane and be someone else
And to do so would please me beyond any knowing.
Then I’d not focus my eyes to stop it.

My brain was a camera trained on a house
A pristinely picket-fenced white bungalow
A blindingly white fence behind which no eyes
Would look forward or back, shuttered silence was all.
My brain was a camera panning the house.

I would move toward it yearningly, lonely and brave
To discover my family, the true ones I came from
All would be well there, my stratagems would thrive
My powers unthwarted, my familiars all named.
I would move toward it yearningly, hopeful and brave.


My powers, nearly unloosed from their bonds
My familiars all but named, my eyes
Like shavings to a magnet left the house’s green patch
Slid to the side yard and a plummeting doom
With my powers so nearly unloosed from their bonds!


For the ground rose up there to a mountain of slag.
Malign and unyielding and glitteringly dark
That dwarfed into nothing that dream of a house
and emptied my eyes of their yearning and hope
Where the ground rose up to a mountain of slag.


Its darkness spread over the glistening world
It tilted and menaced, its mode was denial
My body shrank in on itself and wept air
for all buildings and creatures beleaguered by slag.
For all houses under mountains of slag.

–Deborah Maier
© 2005 D. Maier All Rights Reserved.