Hobble Creek Review
Hobble Creek Review
Diana G. Woodcock
DREAMING WE’RE TRAVELING
THE WORLD AGAIN

“This is the wonderful thing about art, it can bring back the dead . . .”
                              Lynn Emanuel

You are alive again, so we decide to make
the most of it. We get off the train in Ulan Bator
(I think because we didn’t before—we hurried
past, bound for Moscow ).  Your hair is soot gray
from the train’s open window, but you don’t seem to
care—you climb onto the camel’s back.  A bouquet of
miniscule lavender blue wildflowers sprouts from your
backpack.  I whisper, Hide them!  They’re stolen
from the Burren’s crevices!  You’ve been subpoenaed
to court!  But you don’t seem to care.  You call to me,
Our yurt is waiting.

Across the steppes we drift aimlessly, like
fair-weather cumulus in a deep blue sky.  The
camels sway and spit till by and by we’re in a
sandstorm between Alexandria and Cairo, the
sun obliterated, sinking fast.  A staticky rasp
from the taxi driver’s radio: ruh BAH buh music
drowns out the sirocco’s roar.

You stop to wash your hair in a porcelain bowl
beside a rocky shore.  Dingle Bay .
Somnolent boobies with blue feet rest beside you,
flown all the way from the Galapagos.
Nearby, I build a fire from peat.
You ask why.  I reply, To fill hot
water bottles for your cold feet.

At last you stand alone on a Leningrad street.
Your cone has crumbled, fallen from
your hand.  But you don’t seem to care.
Vanilla ice cream melts over the pavement
into the shape of Corfu, expands until it stretches
into miles of warm white sand where once we
walked beside the bluest ocean.
Diana G. Woodcock received her MFA in 2004, and has since been
teaching in Qatar with Virginia Commonwealth University School of
the Arts.  Previously, she spent more than seven years teaching
English in Tibet and Macau, and also working with refugees on the
Thai-Cambodian border.