In my dream, I bring you the baby.

Mind you, this is a dream, 
and there is no baby, 
despite all the rooms we’ve prepared
and the notions we’ve acquired to fill them.

The dream itself is silly,
I remind myself sleeping, 
the way these things happen in dreams.  
There is no baby, and I would wake
but for the shadows of babies lost or forgotten
that have always lived in our dreams, 	
and made us ill with rumors
of their endless shitting and pissing 
and ruining our sleep with their 
carrying on long into the night.   

I hand you the baby in my dream, 
though you don’t know what to do with this baby,
or even what babies are for.
I’m tickled at your discomfort, 
your absence of joy,
your hollow kitchy-koo

for the baby who doesn’t exist,
and your perpetual disapproval 
of the one who handed you this gift
you never asked for or required,
even in our most vivid dream of our self.  

In my most vivid dream,
I hand you the baby 
and I say, 
Ha! 
                        

for my daughter

Most nights we descend to a meadow 
but tonight she forgets I’m afraid of heights 
and the holes a ladder makes in air
and I look down and fear I’ll fall 
through to the dizzying ground 
so I dare not move up and into the ether.

But each step is a color, she insists,
and sounds so sure I want to believe 
though both color-blind and fearful, 
I reach for some insight, but find 
only lack of will,  when I rise against both
my terror, and my better judgment.

Aliyah, I recall, is the name of the voice 
I hear in my sleep, and she means to get up, 
same as her name, though sideways and spinning 
is the way she travels early mornings, howsoever 
much I remind her, and with great portent, 
that up and awake are not one and the same.

She hears me clear but stays locked 
in that space she’s carved  
between wake and sleep, 
entwined in the covers that might even catch her 
if she happens to fall, meantime thinking
who dares allege this is not the way to live?

Once out of bed she says to me, 
You don’t know shit.
And, as she peeks over my shoulder
where I’m writing about our journey,
You don’t even know what a poem is—
And this is the proof, she dutifully submits.