Dream (1989)

I visit the Temple of Apollo. I'm on a plain, a field in Kansas, where my brother and I tried to till our father's soil but ended up fighting and feeling betrayed by our father. The time is 1971, a "seed-time," my brother and I both unitiated. Feeling betrayed by Nixon, by our errant father.

Anguished, I seek Apollo by going into a swank hotel and ascending to the top, a stone temple. I'm a poor pilgrim, don't have much to do with the opulence below. The temple is big and spacious, very ancient, with windows or portals open to a wide sky. A temple of the wind?

Apollo enters, a man in his 40's, Christlike in a flowing robe. I feel like a child standing next to such power and grace. I have a question for him which burns in my heart: I want to know how the god speaks, to see if he truly does as Rilke wrote in his Sonnets to Orpheus, that "song is like a gust inside the god/A wind." But I feel so clumsy and inept, feeling how my every attempt to sing falls so terribly short.

Apollo's response is silence, a gesture that encompasses me, pulls me into a calm, silent center. A reasurrance, like a father's hug, that I will not be left on my own as I continue to write and plow the fields.