All In This Together

I don’t usually pick up hitchhikers but in dream anything goes and a collie is in the car too and they make good listeners so when the hitchhiker climbs in and says just drive I’m able to keep my eye on the road even driving from the backseat while he tells his story to the collie both of them sitting up front something about him being a poet and having had this dream of another poet from another century, he says, who spent summers on his grandparents’ farm that was later developed into an industrial park except for the family cemetery that remained which, the hitchhiker says, he remembers playing in when he was a kid but now the industrial park is gone too and he misses that because there’s a Hampton Inn there instead and an Applebee’s with the overgrown cemetery at the back of the parking lot and one time, he says to the collie, I drove past the poet’s birthplace the house still standing in a small city and it has a brass plaque out front commemorating the poet but no poetry in that neighborhood anymore just an old television set with a smashed tube put out to the curb but don’t let that fool you, he says to the collie, just because it no longer works doesn’t mean Abbott and Costello are dead then he turns back to me and points to his blue baseball cap I hadn’t noticed before with its insignia of a kingfisher and says whose dream is this anyway maybe the collie’s and don’t turn down Epiphany Lane (he sees what I’m up to) it’s a cul-de-sac. But the dream comes to an end before that.