“It is the pleasure of the mystery that I keep with me into the day…”

In keeping with our “Maps & Legends” seasonal theme, BROAD STREET  presents the next dreamy collaboration between poet Judith Serin and artist Masami Inoue … Serin’s actual dreams point to reality in some uncharted territory that Inoue’s watercolors begin to map.

 

Dream San Francisco: Dog Walking

I’m walking a dream dog, a rescue dog who looks, I will realize after waking, like my roommate Ilona’s dog, Cotati.  I lived with them in North Oakland years ago when I first moved to California.  But here he’s my dog in San Francisco.

He bounds up the stairs of a rickety blue-and-white Victorian.  I follow, then walk back down, but the dog remains, whining.

I step up and down twice more, then decide if he stays the next time, I’ll ring the doorbell; this may be his former home.

He does, and after the ring, I hear his dog mind think, “He’ll come around from the back.  I’ll count to three and run to meet him.”

Then the “One, two, three,” before my cat, Quin, wakes me.

At first I’m frustrated, but later decide it doesn’t matter since dreams aren’t linear, and I probably wouldn’t have found out who the man was anyway.  It is the pleasure of the mystery that I keep with me into the day.

 

The Legend of the Series and Its Creators

The “Dream Geographies” series began in summer 2016 and is now reprising in winter 2017–a collaboration between poet Judith Serin and visual artist Masami Inoue, who together are charting the vast unknowns toward which our unconscious dreaming point us. Further installments will come weekly through February.

** Read an interview with Judith and Masami about the collaborative process by clicking here: “Illustrating the Poem that Records the Dream.”

See an earlier “Dream of San Francisco” here–and savor the rest of the series by following the links.

Judith Serin is the author of the poetry collection  Hiding in the World, and her work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Ohio Journal, Writer’s Forum, Nebraska Review, Colorado State Review, Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge, and When Last on the Mountain. She presents these pieces with gratitude to Betsy Davids.

Masami Inoue, who also works under the name Masa, is a Japanese-American artist who has lived on both coasts of the United States. Most recently she moved from the Bay Area, where she and Serin began their collaboration, back to the East Coast.  She creates both digitally and traditionally, focusing on watercolor as her medium.  One of her paintings was featured in print in the “Maps & Legends” issue of Broad Street.