Dream Armor: Volume 2

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.