The following poem appeared in Goodfoot 2 (2002).
"Meaning Dreams" © 2002 Meredith Quartermain
Meaning Dreams
of out-of-print pears.
Pears that came back every year.
The pears you had as children
in the middle of a field
weep into that book.
Meaning dreams us
in passing breezes.
But the dreams drive us
to market
in boxes and baskets.
Meaning dreams thick rubber boots
on a sewing machine
with needle and foot race
to another worker.
People too-small themselves
but wear them anyway
to be signs of significance.
Signs of falling rock blown over by wind.
Checkerboards. Bee stripes.
Signs of wearing out wearing in.
Meaning makes a school a business
a telephone concrete.
Implacable mortar.
Plastic first – then tenacious.
Sticking a tonnage
to turning drums of trucks –
in wheel-barrows, shovels, slushed.
Under patters and smoothers.
Handprints, leaf prints, dog prints.
Between bricks of chimneys.
Harden. Harder. Hardest.
A scraped knee
a sidewalk. Lines break
your mother’s back
arms, legs of trees
and their many fingers.
Humans lost their fur –
in thousands of yellow words
drifting like willow leaves
down to the sea.
Meaning dreams of ice cream.
Stumbles in wet tentacles
running for something melting.
Meaning is a sign:
No Animals
Except Seeing-eye Dogs
for the Blind,
outside the pastry shop
we can’t go in.
A seeing-eye dog at the market
bears Left. Left now, Good boy,
Go left now. That’s a good boy.
On thought trains,
meaning dreams
of seeing-eye gods
as the hoppers
heavy with load
pass under their bridges.
Meaning drives for
washouts and holes,
up the parched hills.
shoots water from blades
of its bulldozer. Grass
nevertheless grows,
after men and women.
Pour water on a roof
trickle down, wash a wall.
As hill tops, wind blown,
reach out to hug
the lightning bolts.
Clouds like bales of cotton batting
are called hammerheads.
At the gas pumps,
Open the air vent,
for fucksakes,
before the bike explodes.
Meaning thinks we have being,
as tanker freight in the harbours.
Where is the where you’d like to be?
Raccoon at the window trying to get in.
Don’t turn the moon away.
Imagine a virus in your eye lens,
rhymed at odd angles of time.
Dream to inoculate against immunity
to infect with small buds or eyes
all the lives lived in tail-lights
idle at cross-roads.
When signs say, Open House,
Think zippers.
From a cement hut in the sky-scrapers,
where does a homesteader strike out
to the unknown landscape –
the lives of each single person and how each wakes in bed-sheets
and washes before a mirror or doesn’t
and dresses in underpants or bras or shirts or trousers or doesn’t
and how each drinks coffee or water, eats cereal or toast or doesn’t
and drives a car or takes the bus to a job or doesn’t
and walks to a store to buy food, clothes, tires, soap or doesn’t
and how each talks on the telephone, writes in the computer,
pours cement into forms, stores bills and coins in small metal boxes
or doesn’t and how each has thoughts and beliefs in this,
and how they do this believing, repeating these doings and believings 365 days a year
for 30, 40 years, each in her or his own way of repeating and believing
and how each one does or does not see beyond an abyss.
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