Recurring Dream: Visible But Hidden, by Brian Kates

Son of Man, by Rene Magritte (Belgium) 1964.

 
Recurring Dream: Visible But Hidden

“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.” -Rene Magritte

The flat blue sea meets a pale horizon.
A turmoil of gray clouds moans at my back.
 
I stand, impassive as the low wall
behind me, bare hands rigid at my side.
 
White shirt, red tie, black topcoat and,
incongruously, a bowler hat, as if posing
 
for Magritte. But where Magritte might have
placed a luscious, leafy, sin-soaked apple,
 
is a door:  Thick timbered, rough-hewn.
Hand-wrought hinges. Sturdy latch. Locked.
 
Brain in nocturnal overcrank, my hand rises
in slo-mo and knocks upon the door.
 
A tentative tap, tap, tap. Then, balled
into a fist, it pounds. Harder, louder.
 
 At last, an answer comes, through
 the clouds, beyond the sea:
 
 “Who’s there?”

Brian Kates

Brian Kates won a Pulitzer Prize and George Polk Award for editorial writing and a Daniel Pearl Award for investigative reporting as a reporter and editor at the New York Daily News. His book, The Murder of a Shopping Bag Lady, was a finalist for Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award in non-fiction. Recent poetry has appeared in Poem and Red River Review. He lives with his wife in a house in the woods in the lower Hudson Valley.