The Passover

[Apophrades]

The Passover

He dreamed a morphine dream.
It was a hospice dream, It is confusing when you use two unusual adjectives to describe something quite abstract.
bathed by memories of darker
times made bright by a twist of plot,
believing scars he inflicted quickly healed.

In all his dreams he craved water,
feeling his sandpaper throat closing.
The drink never came - just Kodachrome
images of the old house with the leaky roof This image is good. "Leaky roof" supplements the craving for water, and neatly foreshadows his drinking habits.
and the well-trimmed hedges.
Once he passed out in them stepping
out of his car. One drink too many,
a chapter often repeated with regret. This line, beginning from One drink... is cliche.

She was there. She was always there,
even when he drank, and hit, then
left her all alone to cry. It was a catholic
marriage for which she had no escape. This is cliche, but I like it as narration
Fifty years passed, and those times were
forgotten by the closing of iron curtains.

Now she was with him again in summer 1964,
riding the tire-framed Ferris wheel, watching Manhattan
standing tall in the distance. It had been
a good time and she was alive, Unless I'm missing the point, "alive" in this context seems like a literal statement rather than "ecstatic, excited etc."
reaching out her hand to pull him toward her,
yearning to take him to the place where guilt falls
away and sweet music plays.

The dream begins to dissolve.
The morphine expires, and images of loftiness
become hardened in the cold mist
of reality. I don't like this stanza. You deal too much with the abstract and concrete, right at once. For a start try removing "of reality".

Soon he realizes he is still alive,
and the place where she lives is a place
he knows he can never go.
He knows they are standing over him,
waiting, crying, remembering.
He remembers, too.
The dropper touches his lips. Soon he
will remember as they have, of happy
times, days of penance, reinvention,
and the opiate trance he hopes
will be his last dream before nothingness
- or fire. Ambiguous, remove it maybe?