HOW TO DREAM BACKWARDS

My little cousin asks me about my dreams

I tell her honestly

We might have shrunk the future down

Into a sliver of a horizon

Too small for all of humanities dreams to pass through

It doesn’t matter she tells me

'Then

I will learn how to dream backwards

Against time

I will learn how to cut strange loops where rivers end

So they will run upward back into the clouds

I will learn how to grow things in both directions

If all that is left of the branches is dead wood

I will nurture roots so deeply

That they too will give up fruit'

'And if your generation forgets how to make music?'

'Then I will crack open the earth

And dance to the songs it sang 1000 years before'

When I ask the child about her dreams

She tells me

Some nights she walks backward across the hours

And uses her grandmothers hands to unbuild cities

So she can fall back awake among the flowers