Woodpeckers and Dead Kids

Just made coffee and watched a young woodpecker eat the seeds from Jack's now enormous sunflower. Maybe he was eating bugs; I know next to nothing about wild life. He certainly was beautiful with the little red crest on his head and the black and white speckles on his feathers. Jack watched for a while too and it made me glad for him to see that he'd grown something tall and gorgeous on his own that was now feeding the birds. These kinds of things are important to him.
Strange dreams last night about dead children. I was back in our old house to pick something up quickly, car keys in hand. A little girl suddenly appeared right in front of me, out of nowhere. I knew she was a ghost although she looked real. She was around eight years old with blond straight hair pulled back in a ponytail. I was frightened but conquered it enough to ask her who she was. She didn't answer but turned her head so I could see a black and blue bruise above her cheekbone. I said something to effect of honey come outside with me and look up so you can go into the light. In the dream I thought, "I don't know what I'm doing here but let's try this." We went out to the steps and she lifted and twisted and seemed to melt into something from a horror film and disappeared into the sky. Later in same dream I am back in the house and I'm mobbed by a pack of little boys who said they'd all been strangled, and that they had followed us from Kings Park (where kids and I lived temporarily before here). They were all cute and didn't seem sad or scary like blonde melting girl, one had on a cub scout cap. Think they wanted to tell me who did it, but I didn't get it. Saw my dead mother outside who I related ghost meetings to, and then my sister ran up and had the same story about mob of little boys. Anybody good at dream interpretations? Being me, I immediately assume the dead are communicating with me. More likely, it was a dream full of symbolism I don't understand. Happy Saturday!

All the Dead Dears

by Sylvia Plath

In the Archæological Museum in Cambridge is a stone
coffin of the fourth century A.D. containing the skeletons
of a woman, a mouse and a shrew. The ankle-bone of the
woman has been slightly gnawed.

Rigged poker -stiff on her back
With a granite grin
This antique museum-cased lady
Lies, companioned by the gimcrack
Relics of a mouse and a shrew
That battened for a day on her ankle-bone.

These three, unmasked now, bear
Dry witness
To the gross eating game
We'd wink at if we didn't hear
Stars grinding, crumb by crumb,
Our own grist down to its bony face.

How they grip us through think and thick,
These barnacle dead!
This lady here's no kin
Of mine, yet kin she is: she'll suck
Blood and whistle my narrow clean
To prove it. As I think now of her hand,

From the mercury-backed glass
Mother, grandmother, greatgrandmother
Reach hag hands to haul me in,
And an image looms under the fishpond surface
Where the daft father went down
With orange duck-feet winnowing this hair ---

All the long gone darlings: They
Get back, though, soon,
Soon: be it by wakes, weddings,
Childbirths or a family barbecue:
Any touch, taste, tang's
Fit for those outlaws to ride home on,

And to sanctuary: usurping the armchair
Between tick
And tack of the clock, until we go,
Each skulled-and-crossboned Gulliver
Riddled with ghosts, to lie
Deadlocked with them, taking roots as cradles rock.


And please click here for the woodpecker's beautiful song!