Jennifer Lagier

SWIMMING OUT OF MY DREAMS
_{Inspired by a Lucille Lang Day poem}

Deep sleep brings me back
to our family’s farm.
Weightless, I lift off from Central Valley soil,
windmill through cloudless sky
above almond orchards.

After landing, I breaststroke
across chilly canals,
sun myself on broken concrete slabs,
sizzle and turn bronze
in one-hundred-degree heat.

Pet dogs from the past resurrect,
wag their tails as we wander
along ditch banks bursting with lupine,
revisit fuzz-filled summer air,
sagging peach limbs relieved
of harvested orbs.

Back at our fruit stand
built of wooden pallets
beside a rural highway
between Escalon and Modesto,
I peddle Dad’s striped Texas melons,
cantaloupes, wrinkled yellow casabas.

All night I float through dioramas
of life in previous decades,
surface out of innocent dreams
toward torrid sunrise.

Jennifer Lagier lives a block from the stage where Jimi Hendrix torched his guitar during the Monterey Pop Festival. She edits the Monterey Review and helps publicize Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium reading series events. Jennifer has published twenty-three books, most recently Postcards from Paradise (Blue Light Press), Illuminations (Kelsay Books).