"Body of Dreams"
Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Peter Streckfus read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.
Last night, my father came to my dreaming
self in the form of a vampire.
A vampire's position is liminal—
neither alive nor dead, both and neither,
nini-funi in Japanese, two-but-not-two.
The vampire, my father, no longer on this earth,
was on the earth but could not touch me
without hurting me, nor could he speak to the dead.
Unable to pass, he craved and feared his lasting.
A bardo is a boundary between states,
Tibetan in origin—a gap that can serve as a bridge,
an open span filled with an atmosphere of suspension,
neither this nor that, nini-funi. In Dante's
version, one is offered a definite end—
suffer for your mistakes, and you will ascend.
The bardo of self-cognizant wakefulness,
the bardo of dreams, the bardo of meditation,
the bardo that occurs at the moment of death,
the bardo of the luminosity of true nature,
the bardo of transmigration or true becoming—
where there is the death of one state of mind
there is the birth of another, and between these
there is bardo, it is said—he came to me like this—
he did not sleep like an animal, nor was he awake.
The ghost state, the purgatorial state, the dream state
—the fish circuiting their tanks. The Chinese of the vendors
in the background, the music in the market,
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Peter Streckfus is the author of The Cuckoo. He teaches at the University of Alabama.
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