Improv, Week 1

Poem: “The Dream” by Irving Feldman

Once, years after your death, I dreamt
you were alive and that I’d found you
living once more in the old apartment.
But I had taken a woman up there
to make love to in the empty rooms.
I was angry at you who’d borne and loved me
and because of whom I believe in heaven.
I regretted your return from the dead
and said to myself almost bitterly,
“For godsakes, what was the big rush,
couldn’t she wait one more day?”

And just so, daily somewhere Messiah
is shunned like a beggar at the door because
someone has something he wants to finish
or just something better to do, something
he prefers not to put off forever
—some little pleasure so deeply wished
that Heaven’s coming has to seem bad luck
or worse, God’s intruding selfishness!

But you always turned Messiah away
with a penny and a cake for his trouble
—because wash had to be done, because
who could let dinner boil over and burn,
because everything had to be festive for
your husband, your daughters, your son.

Improv:

To shun the lamb and the beggar after you died
years ago after dreaming of your dinner boiling
over the gas stove long in need of a new burner.
You could never fit in the ideal of the nifty fifty
porch swing aprons and cleaning, cleaning, clinging
to the penniless afterthoughts of husbandry
and the doings of poker night, always a cold
Heineken, 5:30, on the dot. The rituals flung by you:
dress the kids, make the PB&J before 8am, clean,
knit, clean, iron, never a thought came across
your countenance until the death bed where the lamb
and the beggar asked one simple request, to wonder
and dream what could have been, what could have been.