after Juan Ramon <br /> <br /> <br />A child wakens in a cold apartment. <br />The windows are frosted. Outside he hears <br />words rising from the streets, words he cannot <br />understand, and then the semis gear down <br />for the traffic light on Houston. He sleeps <br />again and dreams of another city <br />on a high hill above a wide river <br />bathed in sunlight, and the dream is his life <br />as he will live it twenty years from now. <br />No, no, you say, dreams do not work that way, <br />they function otherwise. Perhaps in the world <br />you're right, but on Houston tonight two men <br />are trying to change a tire as snow gathers <br />on their shoulders and scalds their ungloved hands. <br />The older one, the father, is close to tears, <br />for he's sure his son, who's drunk, is laughing <br />secretly at him for all his failures <br />as a man and a father, and he is <br />laughing to himself but because he's happy <br />to be alone with his father as he was <br />years ago in another life where snow <br />never fell. At last he slips the tire iron <br />gently from his father's grip and kneels <br />down in the unstained snow and unbolts the wheel <br />while he sings of drinking a glass of wine, <br />the black common wine of Alicante, <br />in raw sunlight. Now the father joins in, <br />and the words rise between the falling flakes <br />only to be transformed into the music <br />spreading slowly over the oiled surface <br />of the river that runs through every child's dreams.<br /><br />Philip Levine<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/night-words/
