Dream Armor

By Diane Estelle Imhoff

The poems in Dream Armor anticipate those in Imhoff's later collection---Whispers Turned Shrill. Dream Armor, as originally conceived, concludes with the poem While the light is ours, ending the collection on a high note. Writing from a life filled with both pain and joy Imhoff crafts her language, building phrase upon phrase, preparing the reader for a revelatory insight, often landing on a bracing final line.

The poems appended at the end of Dream Armor included under the heading, "Anger, Truth, Premonition," express the anger, disappointment, and disillusion Imhoff experienced in her personal life, and, in a haunting way, portend the way in which her life would end.

Diane Imhoff completed Dream Armor a decade before the turn of the millennia. Interred (2020) in Fairfield, California, she had wished to have her ashes scattered in the foothills above Chico, the northern California community she came to love. A braid of her hair was all that remained following her burial.

On a bright winter's day in December Imhoff's former husband (They divorced in 2018.) reduced that braid to a small pile of ash and, along with her two adult sons, threw those remains into the northeast wind blowing through Billie Park in Paradise, California---one of her favorite places to walk. Those ashen remains live anew in "tiny bright pink flowers" as imagined in the poem Flowering Trees.

That same poem prefigures one of the Imhoff family's last lovely memories of her. Three days before she died, Imhoff's eyes shone brightly as she, confined to bed, imagined herself directing, as a conductor before a choir, the trees outside her bedroom, as those trees, in her ecstatic delusion, performed for her in song. Only she could hear their voices, but her joy was evident. Her hands, ears, and eyes were learning the songs of the trees.

In Dream Armor Imhoff explores both the pain people daily experience as well as the joy of the world as it sometimes is, and as it normally should be.

Her language lyrical, her voice clear, her insight searing, Imhoff recognizes, in a way she cannot ignore, how far from the truth veers the socially acknowledged description of life she has been taught. She also sees, with a poet's vision, what could be.

To describe poetically both a distorted reality as well as a vision the of the beauty and joy people could routinely experience reveals genius in Imhoff's language. In her poems she becomes a "weaver of courage, spinner of tales, dreamer of dreams" who offers to show the reader in verse "what we are here for," namely, to help, to love, to speak truth, and to recognize what life could be---a collective celebration of the beauty and wonder of the world and of each other once freed from our conditioned anxiety, apprehension, and fear of loss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667837987

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The poem While the light is ours first appeared in Watershed, Volume 20, Number 2, 20th Anniversary Issue, spring 1997–the California State University, Chico, Department of English poetry periodical.

Copyright ©2022 by Joseph F. Imhoff and Jonathan M. Imhoff

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published and distributed by BookBaby

Printed in the United States of America

Cover, interior design, and copy editing by Thomas Imhoff

U.S. Copywrite Office Registration Number: TXu 2-298-784

Effective date of registration: January 12, 2022

Certification name–Thomas Anthony Imhoff

Certification date–January 12, 2022

ISBN-13: 978-1-66783-798-7

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Autobiographical Sketch

In Memoriam

Dedication

Prologue

Having to say something, anything!

Dream Armor

The Gathering Up of Things

Another Letter to the Atomic Energy Commission

That Week in D.C

How did he do that?

Broken Apart

Trying to understand her

Tenses

Mother-Woman

She hadn’t meant to lose

The cumulonimbus called her

Peacock Feather Pantoum

Musings

Red Satin Ritual

The Old Man and the Dogwood Tree

While the light is ours

Anger, Truth, Premonition

Eight years and one day ago

What Would It Take?

God Damn God

Where are you?

Bitch, Bitch, Bitch

Measured by Money

That Damned Crater

Untangled

Flowering Trees

Autobiographical Sketch–(autumn 1992).

I was born in Fairfield, California in 1955, on the western edge of the Central Valley. My father was a part-time rancher (mostly sheep), and I spent a lot of time herding sheep, delivering hay, and hanging around in knee-high grass and cattle trucks. My husband has tried to take me elsewhere twice