I Dream

I dream water is suddenly pooling on my kitchen floor and the wall to the dining room is soaked with it.  Dashing up the stairs to look for the source, I enter a room I've forgotten about altogether, with curtains from decades ago and the houseplants I favored then. In here the water damage is so great the plaster is peeling away from the timbers beneath. “What happened here?” is all I can think – until I suddenly spot her stretched out atop a moldy chest of drawers: my long-mourned cat Charlotte, (as a baby above) last seen lying on the warm stones just outside my back door and gone for good an hour later.“Oh where have you BEEN, Charlotte?” I cry, reaching to cup her small triangular chin in my hands. “In fields and meadows,” she anwsers.  "Alcohol came into it too."I laugh in the dream, not at the fact that she could talk but at the frank admission in what she has said and am just about to yell the happy news of her return to the other family members now tiptoeing in when my attention goes instead to the houseplants. They look like they need water but can it be that they're alive at all in a room not entered for decades? Charlotte looks like she could use some water, yet she too is down but not out. She is only smaller, flatter, merely diminished, like those promotional sponges that sometimes come in the mail with realtors’ names on them, flat as postcards on dry land but swelling into lovely fat things once you put them in water.And so there it is: a dream of a forgotten chamber with both too much water and too little, where things that should have perished live on. New Orleans 2005 was under this dream I think. Also Haiti 2010. Also all our yearning for those now gone from the shaky old house we call Earth, leaky as it, and imperiled.