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A Dream of Heredity

Dreamed c.1986 by John Calvin Rezmerski

I am walking around
  with my son on my back
   and his son sitting
    on his son's back and
       I get angry
     because they
       are getting
     a free ride
      and my
     feet are
    numb.
I look down at my feet and see
   they are not moving--
     I am sitting on my father's
       shoulders and he is
         sitting on his own
           father's--we are
              midway more or less
                 in a stack of men
                  that disappears way up
                    into clouds
                      like a tornado,
                   a tornado that spins
                    down to where
                   the stack rests
                  on the back of an ape who
                 is not too
                bright but
                 has more
               good will
             and loyalty
              than I have
         ever felt
           toward
              him.
All around us, a mob of women locked arm in arm shout and argue about the whole stack of us, but they
can come face to face only with the ape. Now and then they try to push us over, but whenever someone
pushes at the front someone else pushes back from behind. We are a tower, impregnable and unyielding.
They are a fierce and irresistible savanna. The air is full of the sound of explosions. The smell of powder is
everywhere, and the astringent taste of stalemate. The battle is over. They cannot budge us and we cannot
get off each others' backs. We are all paralyzed because the ape can't move. I wake up saying, "Ease off,
let the ape breathe. Let me
                                               down."

SOURCE: Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, by the Science Fiction Poetry Association, 2005; pp.62-3. This shape-poem was a 1987 winner. I've approximated the twister's shape in the anthology, but I wonder if either that version or mine is quite what the poet intended; I haven't seen the original as published in Tales of the Unanticipated #1, 1986. For all I know that tornado was clunky too, and only the manuscript undulated rightly. Hard to convey any dream through the Gate of Machines, but shape-poems are hardest of all.--Chris Wayan, ed.


LISTS AND LINKS: towers - evolution - apes - 110 years earlier, AE's Planet-Sculpting Ape - genetics - gender - gimme air! - nightmares - dream humor - dream poems - shape-poems like Larry Vigon's The Last Word

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