Dream Armor

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.