"In the God's Dreams," James Laughlin

"In the God's Dreams"
(James Laughlin)

Am I a character in the dreams

of the god Hermes the messenger?   

Certainly many of my dreams   

have nothing to do with the   

common life around me. There   

are never any automobiles or   

airplanes in them. These   

dreams belong to an age in   

the distant past, to a time   

perhaps when nothing was   

written down, to the

time of memory.

I chose Hermes not out of   

vanity but because from what   

I’ve read about him he had a   

pretty good time, was not   

just a drunkard on Olympus.   

In his traipsings delivering   

divine messages he must have   

met some pretty girls who   

gave him pleasure. We know   

that he invented the lyre   

for the benefit of poets,   

and Lucian relates in his   

Dialogues of the Dead that   

he was the god of sleep

and dreams.

My dreams are not frightening,   

they are not nightmares. But   

their irrationality puzzles

me. What is Hermes trying to

tell me? Is he playing a game   

with me? Last Monday night   

I dreamt about a school for   

young children who had heads   

but no bodies. Last night it   

was a cow that was galloping   

in our meadow like a horse.   

Another night, and this one   

was a bit scary, I swam across   

the lake with my head under   

water, I didn’t have to breathe air.

What is the message of these   

dreams? Into what kind of world   

is Hermes leading me? It’s not   

the world described daily in the   

New York Times. A world of   

shadows? A kind of levitation?

How can I pray to Hermes to lay   

off these senseless fantasies,

tell him that I want real dreams   

such as my shrink can explicate.

I’ve looked up lustration in

the dictionary. Its definition

is not encouraging: “a prefatory   

ceremony, performed as a preliminary   

to entering a holy place.” That’s

too impersonal. I want a man-to-man   

talk with Hermes, telling him to   

stop infesting my nights with

his nonsense.

"In the God's Dreams" by James Laughlin appeared in his 1996 collection Poems New and Selected. Laughlin was the founder of New Directions Press, and early on published writers as varied as William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings, as well as Nabokov, Kafka, Borges and Hesse. He suffered from depression, as did other members of his family; "Experience of Blood" is a short poem about the suicide of his son. Since Laughlin's death at 83 in 1997 a series of his letters to Thomas Merton, Delmore Schwartz, and others has been published. One of Laughlin's most anthologized works is "Step on His Head", a poem about his relationship with his children: Let's step on daddy's head shout / the children my dear children as / we walk in the country on a sunny / summer day ...