Interpretations
She has them wrong, my dreams
of fishing or fish in one form or another;
says they’re relics of childhood summers
shrunk to the bobbing of a float.
I remind her, during a marital breakfast,
of my nightmares’ frequent sharks
or those tropic seas whose torpid blues
I scour for the tell-tale bruises of a school;
better yet, of the sulphurous, barren REMscape
’mid whose mad Dali shapes I once pulled
a golden coelacanth from an oil-black tarn
and stood alone, sensing time unstitch
its quilted colours through my fraying hands…
Surely, I say, there’s more to this.
Surely, I’m become a symbol fisher –
my neural nets hauling from dreamt shoals
some silvered, vital anima of the soul…
Over the rim of her tea,
she levels a gaze at me,
before surmising:
a fairground prize, love,
bulging through the plastic
distortion of its puddle.
Over-exposed, self-absorbed,
shallow. Not gold,
but a gauche red bauble.
Not the old man of some
allegorical sea, nor the spiritual
Daddy’s icthusian Son come
again to have his say. No, my
minnow, no, it’s more the one
that got away, and always will.
That float’s still bobbing, boy.
Dream on.
Craig Dobson
