METAPHOR

~for Jennifer, who appeared to me in a dream

On my way to prayer

I stopped to honor a tree.

It toppled at my touch.

After I had set it right,

paintings sprouted everywhere–

feasts and flowers, long-gone friends.

All the streets were colored

and lined up the way I remembered

in New Mexico, or possibly Illinois.

I stopped at a diner to eat.

The poet who sat down beside me

showed me a notebook. She wrote:

Transitions. Before and after.

This is all metaphor 

for the thing that goes between.