We were in a grassy area next to a stream. The grass was so vibrant green it had a blue aura, how I imagine Tennessee to be. We were shy with each other at first. You barely looked at me but when you did it was with the same telling eyes as always. I could tell what you wanted to know and it didn't take me long to spill it. "You know I'm in love with you, right?" You melted a little at this. You were happy to hear that it's real. I was happy to see you standing your ground, not running away like I always imagined you would do. "I want to get to know you better," I followed. Ease. We can be friends.

At a dangerous turn in the river, a raft loaded with farm animals hits a snag. Several fall off — sheep, pigs, goats, cows — and are swept into the current. The air is filled with heartrending cries. Those still on board jump in the water after them. One, however, a large tan-colored pig with black spots, calmly climbs ashore and starts foraging in someone’s brightly colored vegetable garden. The pig doesn’t notice when the others slip beneath the surface.

1. It takes the form of a documentary. Recently, lots of people having been getting red lights shone in their faces. Just going about their normal business, then their face is illuminated a bright red. Investigators have tried to find the source of the light, but to no avail. It happens indoors and outdoors. There have been sightings of a large, red light source in the clouds.
   
   
2. I am in a comfortable beige study. Leather, sepia, oak. I am sitting on a comfortable chair and am petting a young polar bear. It is biting and scratching me (painfully). As I play with its white fur I notice the skin underneath is completely black.
   
   
3. I am trekking in the Himalayas. It feels like Tibet. There is a large group of us and we walk single file on the suggested path of rocks. It is very sunny. Our guide tells us that we are to climb a natural stairway - "Only 20 meters!" We climb and I am third up. There is a building and a stone doorway with a tiny hole at the base - the first two have gone through the hole. I know I cannot go through the hole, so I step around the doorway. It was free-standing anyway. The residents of the building welcome us. The others hand over a stone as a gift. I hand them a terracotta pot / waterbowl that I had picked up ealier and carried with me. I have put a stone in it as well.

1 .....something had been going on -- saw the shadow of a creature on the ceiling of small white room, no windows, descending -- not scary -- a parrot. I looked for biscuits in a cupboard and a white bowl for some water, because I knew the parrot had come to help us. The only biscuits I could find had jam in the middle & I knew that would not suit a parrot too well, but they were all I had. The only bowl I could find was wide and rather shallow, but never mind. I asked the parrot if it would like the biscuits and water and it said it would. "I'm glad you speak English," I said, knowing now for certain that it was a helpful person changed into a parrot....

&2 I was driving my car up a hill, round a bend, very badly, drifting way out to the right, dangerously, but it wasn't a car, it was a bicycle....Stefan was riding the bicycle and I saw him take off some thirty feet above the houses at the side of the hill, and disappear behind them. I heard him yell, in the distance, "Dad!". He was bloody, but no bones broken, walking towards me. But why had he been wearing his new green trousers when riding the dirty old bicycle?

This weekend I dreamed of an archeological dig (and deciding to homeschool Gideon so I could bring him along), speaking on who gets away with making butt thumbing threats, having to answer questions on religion when buying plane tickets, not being able to speak because my mouth is full of hard & sticky gum, separate tables, a Turkish beach vacation, pictures in my bikini from that vacation being posted on the Harriet blog, a man's sex reassignment surgery, knitting and iguanas.

For the first time in my dreaming half century underworld
there it was
a Monarch Butterfly.
yes ever flapping this first butterfly
a sight bringing me toward the surface
still i remained smiling asleep

I’m in a strange house with strange rooms oddly juxtaposed.
Doors are where they shouldn’t be; some open onto walls.
I ask the carpenter why this is so.
Muscular and old, he answers with a smile.

Now we’re outside, walking through an old industrial area.
I see trucks; workmen; the smudged rear windows of warehouses.

The carpenter is no longer a carpenter.
His work apron is gone.
Now he’s a madman with twinkling eyes.

Who knows what he knows.

My grandmother’s uncle was upset that no one recognized him. I touched him gently, affectionately, on the side of his face. His angry expression melted away. He closed his eyes. When he opened them he was still very old, but he was himself again.

I dreamed that some woman was combing my hair, digging the comb into my scalp. It hurt, and hair was being yanked out in huge clumps.

Running down a gentle slope scattered with old dry oaks, dodging circular bolts of lighting thrown by someone whose smile tells me he’s just having fun. The one aimed at my head wakes me up.

Last night I dreamed I was in Italy sitting around a table with a group of Australian friends, all of whom we had met by chance in the streets of Italy or at the beach.
‘You can almost guarantee running into someone you know,’ I heard one woman say to her companion.
‘It’s ridiculous to travel so far away and there they are, all your friends. May as well not leave home at all.’

I sat opposite old friends, Dianna and Roger. I had not seen them for years. In the dream they appeared just as they were when I knew them best over twenty years ago. Roger was still darkhaired and sprightly, Dianna, a couple of years older, still trim and fit. Dianna was nursing their daughter, who is now in her mid twenties, but in my dream Ingrid was still a small child of less than two. Dianna was stroking her cheek. There were other old friends and acquaintances, mostly those we had met through our years of contact with Chris and Suzie.

Earlier at another dinner in my dream Chris and Suzie and their two children were sitting at a table with Suzy’s elderly father. I knew that Suzie needed to help her father regularly to the toilet.

I was not happy to be there. They seemed such a wowserish family. Here we were in Italy and they were not even drinking wine with their meal. They were all on water, which is uncharacteristic of Chris.

Their daughter poured Bill and I a glass of wine from a Chianti bottle. Even though I was grateful for the wine I was annoyed that she had not at least asked whether we preferred wine or water. I did not like her making the choice for me.

I had with me a gold embossed Easter egg that opened up into some sort of container. In it I had stored my partial denture and some play dough from among Leo’s toys. Suzie took it from me curious about the shape of the egg. Her father then took it from her and before I knew it he had opened the egg and its contents went missing. I was furious. How could I sit at this table a front tooth missing and still have conversation? I wanted to leave.

We queued up for food at a huge bain-marie and again Chris and Suzie’s daughter poured Bill and I another glass of wine, while the others stayed on the water. Then Bill and I were roaming through the streets of Italy. Somehow Bill had managed to take his leave, even before the main course had been served and although I was glad to be away from them, I felt guilty to have not stayed at least till the end of the meal.

dream about tornadoes (recurrent) again last night.

The Mountain Lake

My dream begins with a short afternoon hike in the Catskill Mountains - a walk, really, since I am on a wide road like path with a moderate incline. I am accompanied by a young black male who seems to be a friend, though I don’t really know who he is. As we walk we share conversation and a joint of good marijuana, becoming quite high and happy. Eventually we reach a lookout point that provides a nice view of the surrounding mountains. At this point my friend seems to vanish and is replaced by several other people who I apparently know. I tell them about the rest of the trail to the top of the mountain we’re on and we agree to return the following day for the complete hike, arranging for an early start. Another short walk brings us to a small mountain lake surrounded by grassy lawns and picnic tables. I remark to the people I’m with that the water is quite cold and deep. As I walk along the shoreline I stumble and fall into the lake and begin to sink rapidly toward the bottom. I am suddenly aware that I have objects in both of my hands - a rock sculpture of some sort in one and my father’s old boy scout bugle in the other. I am reluctant to release the bugle, but realize that I must or I will drown. As soon as I resurface after releasing these objects I yell “Shit!” and start swimming toward shore, for I am suddenly in the middle of the lake. It is at this point that I realize that the people who are with me have changed. Gone are those who have accompanied me on my walk. They have been replaced by my cousin, his wife, and their teenaged son. All three have jumped into the lake to save me, but are now swimming along beside me. My cousin finds a shallow spot - a submerged rock shelf, and stands up as the rest of us continue to swim. I am not looking where I am going and bump into a young woman on an inflatable rubber raft. All around us are lily pads. The dream concludes as I approach the shore. A troop of girl scouts are having a picnic nearby and are unaware of what has been happening.

climb old concrete tower with a
railing across the top between ascent
& descent but there's no stairs for
descent -- vertigo

at my house one afternoon, W has
returned from a trip -- I ask his son
for news -- I'm playing a small digital
piano -- a small dog belonging to a visitor
snaps at me -- I put my forearm into
its mouth and it quietens down comes
& sits on the bar

looking out the window -- a big
black ape-like creature whose mouth
is a mushroom I am afraid of it &
hope it can't get in the house

in a bedroom a very young Jason
is sitting in a corner eating a sandwich
-- he throws up -- & then wants to go on eating his sandwich --
I try to persuade
him not to

My dreams last night came in snatches.

Ella, my daughter was a small child, not herself as I know her, but in the form of Benjamin from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a wizened up aged child. She lived in her room upstairs alone. I say she but she had an androgynous quality as if neither male nor female, neither old nor young, and she was lonely. I had managed to find her a puppy with whom she could play but for some reason this puppy did not stay and again my Benjamin Ella character was sad and lonely.

I was travelling in some foreign land with my husband and another of my daughters. My husband raced ahead as he often does and we were left to pull on our own resources without a map. We spent time in a large department store. I did not want to buy anything, only to look. Somehow the trip had gone wrong and I was bored. And worried about how we might spend the rest of our time.

My dreams merged here and I was back with Ella Benjamin. An old woman, proprietor of a large shopping centre, had said that Ella Benjamin could look after her puppy as she herself did not have time to manage it. Ella Benjamin was delighted.

One day later the woman came to visit. Ella Benjamin and the puppy were playing in the mad crazy manic way that puppies do, rolling and tumbling over one another. The puppy snapped at Ella Benjamin’s hands. The woman was horrified at the sight of this and slapped them both, forcing them apart.

‘He’s only a puppy,’ I said.

‘He needs discipline’, she said.

I woke up.

. . . dreamed that I called myself "Luke" after receiving a distress message from the princess on Obi Wan's TV. There was no time to waste. They were going to use the drug on her in the morning. Obi Wan agreed to help. First we stopped at a pharmacy to speak to a Hippowoman who knew of the place where the princess was being held. The Hippowoman delivered drugs to this zoo/military space facility. We had to be careful, her bosses were watching. Then Obi Wan and I spoke with the family of someone I went to high school with. I introduced myself as Luke but later in the conversation after they told me about the dead baby I admitted that I was known to them as Rebecca. But I didn't feel comfortable telling them about why I was now "Luke" or my mission. It seemed too weird to share, just like earlier in that dream when I crossed the street wearing a bikini and high boots. So goofy and exposed, no good explanation. I had trouble keeping it together after I learned of the baby. "They'll just have to try again" the mother said. It didn't seem that easy to me.

Two disjointed dream fragments:

1) A handsome woman with long black hair streaked with gray and tied back stands before a wash basin. She kneads a garment in the water, then gathers it up in her hands and holds it high above her head, wringing it out. The water cascades into the basin as she intones "ay de mi - los dolores son hechos de manchas..."

2) A woman is seated on a low, three-legged wooden stool, surrounded by 6 other women in an asymmetrical grouping, variously kneeling in front of and beside, and standing behind her. They are in a darkened room, and eerily illuminated from an unseen source. The scene looks theatrical, though it's not theater, and I'm simply witnessing rather than participating. The woman on the stool sings a lament, and the others join in the chorus. It is plaintive and beautiful. I don't remember the words - it might have been in another language.

Just a few nights ago, I had one of these reoccuring dreams where I’m chased by the authorities. What my alleged crime was, I have no idea. Late in the dream, I seek cover in a queen-sized bed that’s set right in the middle of the street. Actually, there’s two of us, but what happens between the sheets, let’s not go there. Anyway, the pressure becomes almost unbearable, until suddenly, I find the perfect escape. Call it poetic justice, or not, but I know I can get rid of my pursuers just like that–by waking up.

I had a dream that I had no ceiling. Above my bathroom there was nothing -- no plaster, no wood, no moulding, no tile. It was rotted. It was a black puddle above my shower. I was worried that other people would think it was gross.

I have a dream where I am with my family when suddenly, the ground begins to shake and rumble. We all start running. There is an alien invasion, and the aliens are these huge, metal spheres that roll over the Earth and destroy whatever is in their path. They don't exactly chase humans, but they do roll through more populated areas. My family runs and runs and runs. We head towards the coastal cliffs. We run through scaffolding of the side of the cliff, that presumably the aliens would not attack. We keep going, the thing rolls by and keeps rolling.

We meet up with some other people and go into this beautiful, coastal house with our community. Under the house, the group has built an extensive network of underground tunnels, with windows that open up in the cliff so that we can get light. You might not even know you're underground. We wait in the house until we hear that distant rumbling, and then run downstairs to the underground portion. The thing rolls over the house, destroying it, but we are all safe underground.

There is no way we can figure out to destroy the things yet, as they are extremely tough, metal spheres and we Earthlings don't know their weakness yet--but there is always a weakness.

We start hanging out in the beautiful underground house.

Last night I dreamt that it all made sense. Everything I did and said that night that I am now so ashamed of took on ordinary, understandable meanings. My words became innocent and well all laughed.

And then I came up with the idea for Fear Factor.

I dreamed I was on my way to school. Chris called to tell me that it was going to rain and I should change my pants. I told him to forget it, I was already late for school. I was late for homeroom, I considered going straight to my first period, but knew if I did that I'd be marked absent. On the stairs there were some handicapped students being helped up the stairs, they were moving slowly, so I went down the hall to take another set to my homeroom on the third floor. On the second floor I walked past an office. Inside was Joe Biden dressed as a judge.

The next dream was about Rebecca Loudon's 3 cats. A dominant male was beating on Paris the Genius cat. I told somebody to open the closet and make sure she wasn't trapped inside. It turns out, she had been.

I dream this some time ago. I dream that I have a bike, it's blue, it's a good quality bike, and it's too tall for me.

It's mine though. I ride it around campus. I'm free on my bike, and I'm empowered.

I lock the bike up--I attach it to one of the bike racks on one of the streets that border the quads.

I want to tell you that I've ridden my bike that's too big for me--that I ride it all the time--because I know you'd be proud of me that I've finally learned how to ride a bike. I'm proud of me.

But in the dream, as in life, we aren't talking.

I don't have the key to unlock the bike from the rack. And a part of it gets stolen.

I'm too small for the bike anyway.

I have moved into my new home in Ottawa. The house is huge, with interiors defined by flat, glaring white surfaces. Every room is tinged with a cold, clinical blue. The house exudes loneliness. I move through hallways and a bedroom and see two sets of sliding closets, unimaginatively placed parallel to each other.

I move to other parts of the house and see that it belongs to O's family; I’m their guest. The knowledge doesn’t lift my spirits—they’re not my favorite people. With the knowledge that this giant house is for a family of four, the spaces seem bigger than ever. I walk down a wide, white hallway to peer into O’s room. The king-sized bed is rumpled with toys and possessions tossed about. Objects—too much material wealth—litter the floor.

In another part of the house I see her younger brother. Small and nerdy, sporting oversized glasses with brightly colored rims—the trendy kind—he sits before a super-sized computer, eyes fixed on the screen. One hand deftly navigating the mouse, a vapid smile on his face, he is learning Chinese. As the words scroll by, he selects the characters he needs extra help with remembering, or that are otherwise important. The computer talks to him as he engages in this expedited process of learning. I see an unfair advantage at work.

I move to a workshop or display center, where Uncle L shows off the fancy centerpieces he has made. This is his hobby. Although he thinks of these items as high art, they actually look just like the expensive, pointless home décor sold in bourgeois chain stores such as Pottery Barn. As a form of appreciation for my looking at his art, he presents one of the centerpieces to me as a gift. It is one of the more boring-colored of the pieces. He could have at least given me a brightly-colored one.

Last night I dreamt that I was a virgin princess, and I was captured by three gods: the dragon, the dirt, and the dark. The dragon, the dirt, and the emptiness. The dragon, the emptiness and the grave. They were in competition with each other over me—it was a game for them, who could keep me, who could capture me from the one who had kept me. I flew on the back of the dragon, red scales and muscles flexing under me, until the emptiness pulled me away. The emptiness flaunted me until the dragon swooped in and took me back. Back and forth, back and forth, each taunting the other with his prize, just wanting the game to continue. And then we were in some building and I don’t remember who had me, but the dirt snuck in and the dirt grabbed me and pulled me along behind him down the stairwell, down and down and the dragon couldn’t follow and the emptiness was left behind, down and down until we were in a dirt basement, and I could not get back up and there was water running down the walls and there were rats and crawling things and the dirt did not even pay attention to me there, just tossed me to the floor and I cried and I didn’t want to be there, I wanted to get out. And somehow I managed to send a message to the dragon and the emptiness, to let them know where I was, so they could come and save me. And somehow I managed to get out and they took me again.

And I realized, I am in love with the emptiness and the dragon. I love their game. I love riding through the sky on the dragon’s back. I love the feeling of the emptiness enclosing me. I am in love with them. I do not want the dirt. I do not want the grave.

Except, later on the grave decides to woo me. He whispers look at this bed I have laid for you, and the other two will never notice and just come with me for a little while. And I am cautious; I don’t trust him, but I think that after just a little while, I will go back. And so I say yes. Take me away with you. Yes.

The dream I had last night must have been detailed, but I only remember one moment, and that’s the part right before I woke up. I don’t remember where I was, and I don’t remember if I was even myself, but whoever was conscious in the dream pointed out a very large, caterpillar-looking insect. It was about five inches long with furry spikes along its back, and I believe it was white. The last few moments of my dream involved this caterpillar finding another insect and killing it, taking it in its jaws and crushing it. A voice in my head said, “Why does he do that?”

There was a terrible apocalypse that made everyone's money sticky and no one could get their money out of the ATMs anymore. It had something to do with an anarchic, communal effort to pour maple syrup into the machines. Since apocalypses require one to make quick decisions, I had to make a split second choice about whether I wanted to spend the rest of my life indoors (in a building like the art deco American Airlines hangar at La Guardia Airport, the building with that beautiful font) or outdoors. I couldn't find Peter, so I had to make a choice that I thought he'd make so we could find each other. I choose the "indoor" option, and when I moved indoors, I could see his face pressed up against the other side of the glass. I made the wrong choice. So I begged and begged the "indoor" leaders to let Peter join us indoors, and they gave in to me. But when I ran up to meet him, I realized it wasn't Peter. It was someone impersonating my husband to get indoors and that again, I fucked up.

Last night I dreamed that I returned to high school after a mysterious absence. In the cafeteria a bully girl sat in my seat. I asked her to move. She wouldn't. So I picked her up and slammed her against another table. I held her down and dared her to free herself. She couldn't. She told me that I was "insanely strong" and I added that I was very angry too.

I dreamt that Ron Silliman had ended one of his blog posts with the words, "My weird."

My first night back home I dreamed the following things: funny-shaped pills, driving to many cities, a cheer/dance routine performed to a poem, a poet complaining about his sex life, a party, a mall, looking for a toilet in a salon and senseless murder.

I had a pleasant dream about Bill Luoma last night. Bill was going through my pile of books to get rid of, asking about the poems I planned to read last night. He had really good recall of poems of mine that were similar to but (in my mind) not as good as the poems I had intended to read. In my dream, I gave him the logic book that I have not yet given him in real life (Naive Causal Modeling, volume 1), and I talked to him about the advantages of backwards causation (part of the book argues the possibility of backwards causation, i.e. the idea that things I do today might have caused past events). I argued that backwards causation might enable Bill to change elements of his past life if he wanted to, by triggering backwards causation with his actions today, but Bill thought any past events he might be causing today had already happened and thus were unchangeable. But I said that meant that the effects would be determining the cause which is impossible. . .

In my dream Bill was using a baseball bat like a walking stick and spent a lot of time pausing to think. When he did speak I often felt surprised by what he said, and I had to think about how to respond to it. I guess this is my impression of Bill: soft-spoken, casual (not causal!) in affect, but deep, as if when you say something to Bill it takes a long time to float down through his attention, but when it's fully registered he comes back with an incisive but very light response. I'm always interested in conversation dreams which show me my internal models of other people, which are mostly about a mixture of gesture, timing, and tone. It's interesting to think of having these simple models of other people's way of presenting in one's own head--I wonder to what extent these models get triggered when doing, for example, email?

Very complex dream last night, in which many past events of my life had happened differently/been substituted for. In general, the main difference was that I hadn’t moved to LA in Summer of 2003 (when I married Tova). Instead, as I realized while chatting with my old friend Phil Poulter, I taught at MCC in Texas (which had been vastly expanded, to the size of a university) where I was exploited during the Spring 2003 semester by being given only one class [this is a reference to how I was treated in NYC that semester at John Jay College of Criminal Justice—I was cut down to one class which damaged my economic prospects in the city] and further exploited (in the dreamlife, at dreamMCC) by being forced to edit the student newspaper for free, in return for a chance to teach more classes in the future. I kept running into my students from the 03 dream-semester, smart, affluent, mostly Asian (dreamMCC had demographics more like UCI than central Texas, and I think the students from the “dreamclass” referred to the students in my Art of Poetry class at UCI in Spring 2001—probably the single class I have most enjoyed teaching, to naturally thrilling results (I won an award!)—the sort of class that I feel like my friends with PhDs and “real” teaching jobs have the chance to teach all the time.

In the dream I had had to more or less write the student newspaper myself, with help from a handful of kids in my “dreamclass” (which was just a comp. class) and it had been short, naturally. I had been dragooned into doing it because the person whose job it was had been on leave, maybe pregnancy leave (a reference to how I filled in for a teacher on pregnancy leave in Fall 2003 at Cypress College, where I was also poorly treated [classes cancelled in summer 2004]—interesting how the referential dates revolve around Summer 2003). In the “dreampresent” the student paper was huge and done by students. It occurs to me that dream MCC represented all the community colleges (since MCC was the first one), and Phil represented all the colleague-friends from the community colleges (since he was the first and best one).

Then found myself at the Martin house conversing with Phil P and James Sherry. Alcoholic subtext, but not directly mentioned—just that kind of conversation. Someone was puking in the garden. Then found myself in New York City (Williamsburg) for John Ashbery’s wedding [?]. Everyone involved very shy of publicity. Many old southern gentlemen talking about John, comically mock-pompous orations. Teenagers recording everything with camcorders, the tapes from which were meant to be confiscated at the end of the ceremony, but some of the parents of the teenagers [poor relations!] plot to sneak out with tapes to tell to the tabloids. So, a confidential wedding and it’s unclear who the other groom and/or bride was, so also a one-man wedding. There is a lovely circle-dance of teenagers pointing camcorders as they spin. It ends with confusion, as there’s a general effort to confiscate tapes, poor relations screaming and crying as the tapes [negotiable memories] are pulled away from them. I am the poor relations of course, as much as [no, more than!] I am Ashbery. I would like to be Ashbery, which is different.

After the wedding, I start driving home but have drunk too much and lose control of my car in a small tree-lined neighborhood just north of Williamsburg [very funny—suburb with lawns where Bed-Stuy should be]. I crash the car in a yard. I get out, and find my head is bleeding. I know if the police catch me I’ll get a DUI so I decide to walk home. I have to walk with no shirt on because I’m using my shirt to collect blood from my head. I go into the backyard of a suburban house and find an outdoor pantry from which I take a bottle of water. I worry that I’ll get punished no matter what I do next, because the crashed car is evidence against me, but on the other hand if I’m sober when they see me who’s to say I was drunk when I crashed. (The answer is, the wedding guests will narc on me.) So I walk and find a small southern-style convenience station, the sort you’d find where one one-lane highway intersects another, with a Bubba type dude inside. He doesn’t care I’ve got no shirt on and a bleeding head. I ask for directions to the train but he doesn’t know shit. Then I walk out and some tourists point me to the train. It’s the train to Manhattan (where apparently I live). I find a backpack on my back, put on a shirt for the train, find my head has stopped bleeding and my vision has cleared, and off I go. It’s actually the 1/9 train (misplaced, and of course the 9 train is discontinued now).

Dream seems to reference my comments on “backward causation” on my blog yesterday, the idea of changing one’s life through a natural, unnoticed process of backwards causation where actions today cause events in the past to unfold differently until there you are in a different present—my dream runs with this [nerdy] idea of an unstable continuum.

"Why on earth are we painting the walls stark white?" This is what I'm thinking as I dip my roller in the paint and slather it on the wall before me. I'm wearing a long, cream-colored silk wraparound skirt printed with pale pastel flowers. It occurs to me that this is the wrong garb for painting, since it will probably get ruined by paint drips. There's another woman here, painting the wall adjacent to mine - a stunning, slender black woman with a large afro. We both dip and roll without saying a word. At the exact same moment, as if by design, we both set down our rollers and step back to assess our work. I'm still thinking how boring it is to paint the walls white. Suddenly the other woman shakes her head violently, and a rain of bright purple paint flies out of her hair, landing in big splotches on me, on the walls, everywhere. We look at each other and laugh.

The hand that touched my elbow was cold, and felt clammy. I turned to look back in panic. It was perhaps my startled reaction and the expression of alarm on my face which brought a sudden, amused smile upon the face of the person I found standing before me. The features of that face were like a sketch from a distant past, his right hand was covered with a white bandage…and it looked a bit dirty. I forced my mind to recollect where I had seen the face. It was like those drawings one made as children, where the trick is to keep moving the pencil chronologically on the dots till a face is formed on the paper. I stood on the sidewalk, trying to recognize that face, feeling fuzzy brained. The person, who was standing before me, kept smiling all the while, watching my confusion. Not helping, not speaking at all. Just smiling mildly. The drops of rain fell in a soft spray on him, wetting his hair and clothes, but it did not seem to bother him.

He just stood on the pavement. Smiling. Involuntarily, I extended my umbrella towards him; to save him from the rain, and to my sudden, absolute horror, I saw the face and the form disappear. It appeared as if he was dissolved in the pouring rain. I was holding out the umbrella in an empty space. Few passers by gave me vague looks and I pulled the umbrella back, feeling foolish and scared. My heart was beating hard. I could feel the pulse throbbing in my temples, inside my throat and behind my eyes. In my half awake state I saw the raindrops roll down my window pane.

A casual swim begins in calm, blue waters. First I’m alone. Then I hear others laughing and splashing. The waters expand. In the distance there’s a small rocky island. I start swimming toward the island, but then a breeze comes up and the current pulls me off course toward a cliff. At the edge of the cliff is a black road; beyond and far below is where the ocean begins. A fog settles in. I feel a sense of panic. Then it lifts and somehow I can see under it and over it, but not through it. Now the stars are out. I’m walking on the road. I hear my brother’s voice. He and his wife are in a cave with pale walls. They’re waiting for me with a small fire and a meal of bread and cheese and wild greens. Before I take any, I realize that I’m holding a key. When I look up, it’s daylight again and I’m facing a locker on a busy street corner. But before I can open the locker, I have to empty out my mother’s closet. Most of what’s in it is old and stained and doesn’t need to be saved. Then I find a familiar looking towel. I retrieve it for the locker. There’s a field of corn stubble between her closet and the street corner. While I’m crossing it, I see a young woman standing alone, her back turned toward me. She’s been crying. I don’t know who she is or why she’s unhappy. I ask her if I can help. She smiles and says it’s too late. And I think, how strange that we are standing here in a field. How beautiful and lonely and sad everything is.

The other night I dreamed that I went to a psychiatrist for an evaluation. I got my glasses out of my purse so I could see. There were a bunch of hovering objects over her desk. She told me to focus on the pickle and tell her what I saw. Is it improving or getting worse? she asked. The pickle was getting worse, it was blackening. As I contemplated the pickle, I became aware that the pickle represented the masculine.

Dream # 2:

Some of the last words I wrote before coming to this place were "with wings." With or without wings, I now find myself flying over a rugged desert landscape. Make that without wings. I look at my outstretched arms and see that they are indeed arms, not wings. Now they're stretched out to the side, now palm-to-palm in front of me, now held close to my sides. Yes, this is effortless!

Soon I lose interest in how I'm flying and focus on the rapidly changing landscape below. I swoop down low over a boulder field and wonder how it would be if all the rocks were the color of lapis. Instantly they change to a deep, luminous blue. Now I'm flying high over waterways coursing through an emerald forest, now over an ancient city.

I'm suddenly aware of the precariousness of flight. A disembodied voice says "you know, this is a dream." Out loud I say "you know, I can do this in my waking life too," and awaken here.

Dream #1:

I am reading Pedro Páramo, whether the novel or the play I'm not sure. But this much I know: there is an elusive passage that appears and disappears. Sometimes it's there, sometimes not. But it changes something about the book/play, deepens one's understanding of it if one is lucky enough, or maybe astute enough, to catch it. I'm sitting here reading the book/play intently, and Sidney is here in the room with me, sitting in his comfortable chair, waiting to see if I catch the passage. Suddenly I see it, and it's as if a light has lit up in my head. Only now, as I look up from the book in excitement to tell him, he has vanished from his chair, as readily as the passage itself and the ghostly inhabitants of Comala.

Screep, screep, screep - it's 2:11 a.m., and I'm abruptly roused out of the dream when my car alarm suddenly and mysteriously sounds outside.

I had this long Yoko Ono dream, where I was walking with her all over creation and talking while we walked. We occasionally entered a bookstore or a music store, but generally we were outside.

She was pretty mellow and I asked her questions about her art, but we probably spent seventy-percent of the conversation talking about the trivial things that make up life.

Occasionally, we ran into other people and I would try to give her the "star treatment" during the introduction but neither Yoko nor the other person was ever impressed.

She was just an older lady who had been shaped by life the way a tree gets shaped by standing on earth a certain amount of time.

I tried to tell her how much I loved Grapefruit near the end of the dream, but she just smiled. I think she said something about liking Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems which now that I type it in my conscious mind seems unlikely in real life.

She didn't feel the need to talk all the time during our walk. She did mention the death of her husband at one point, but she wasn't talking in sound bites or trying to make it sound readworthy. She was just a woman missing someone.

I enjoyed my time with Yoko Ono.

I had woken up in the middle of the night sick and I had the dream when I went back to sleep.

Then when I woke up again I felt better and feel as though I am healing.

So thank you, Yoko Ono.

dreamt that me and Ramsey Lewis were renting rooms from Linda. Linda was an eco-terrorist...her and her girlfriend would rent houses in Contra Costa County, plant forests inside the houses, watch houses be overwhelmed by trees, and mold, and spores, and leaves, caves would form, rooms would crumble, houses totally destroyed, forests began taking over the neighborhood. Ramsey Lewis and i reneged on the rent and got the hell out of there.

Klaus Neumann was in my dream last night. Structurally it was a familiar sort of dream.

I am with a group of people, one of a group, colleagues from work or university and we are planning to meet Klaus for coffee. Somehow our group breaks into smaller subgroups and I become disconnected from them. I am standing alone below a tall building with an overhanging veranda. On the veranda itself I can see one of these subgroups of people playing a game together, maybe darts or ten pin bowls.

Their laughter echoes across the courtyard and I feel left out. I want to join them but cannot figure out how to reach them. In the meantime I am aware of Klaus who is supposed to be meeting us all. I do not want to miss out on seeing him. Across the way I can see another elevated veranda on a separate building and I know that Klaus is there with one or two others. I am jealous of these people. I want to be with Klaus.

In the dream, somehow even without seeing him, I know that Klaus is busy and preoccupied. He has no time for us, least of all for me. This is what I call the structural familiarity of my dream. It frames that old sense of exclusion, of not being wanted. When I wake up, I think in my logical and adult head that it is simply because Klaus has not yet responded to my email of a few days ago. The longer he takes to reply, the more rejected and unwanted I feel. But I must not take it personally.

- dreamt I lost my entire life last night. Even my plants.

Sarah Connor broke into a corporation run by the mob. She is frantically photocopying/printing documents, information from the company that she needs. There's a young male employee with her, a slovenly, slacker-type who's cracking jokes. He does not get the seriousness of the situation. Sarah senses that the terminators are near and tells the employee they need to go. He doesn't understand what's happening so she points to the security monitor. It shows rooms full of dead employees and the mob's heavily armed security forces shooting large machine guns. The security forces are quickly mowed down.

Sarah takes the employee to another room, perhaps a safer one, and continues to print out the documents that she needs.

Spot fires burst out in different sections of the kitchen, and from within the body of the radio which reports details of fires elsewhere, I can see the flames lick up the sounds. I use a hose to quench the fires but no sooner have I stopped one than another erupts.

Everywhere it is hot. A piece of metal on the ground is molten. I pick it up with tongs and toss it into a bucket of cold water. I do not realise at first that there is a crayfish living in this water. The heat of the metal causes the water in the bucket to boil. I hear the crayfish scream as it is cooked alive. Guilt as red and hot as the flames sears through me but I cannot pay it any attention. I pull the cray out of the water, thinking we can eat it later, that way at least it will not be wasted, but the RSPCA will be critical of me.

Tania, our old nanny, is desperate for a fruity bread roll, similar to the one I have put aside for later. I go to the shops to buy one for her, but they are sold out. Substitutes will not do. They are not as tasty, but I buy one anyway thinking I will give the one at home to Tania and eat the other myself. It should be okay toasted.

Everywhere outside en route to the shops are signs of devastation. I am fearful of the next fiery outburst.

In my hands, a framed sepia photograph of a crowded street in Mexico. Most of the men are wearing large straw hats, no two of which are alike. The picture comes to life: the hats, but not the faces or clothing, are infused with color; there is conversation, laughter, movement; the sound of a woman’s voice becomes the scent of gardenia.

End of the world dream. In NYC. Mass panic & confusion. A huge building with a four-story balcony inside, lots of people, elevators. Nobody knows where to go or what to do.

Somehow I get home. An SUV-sized (and shaped) bomb lands on the front lawn, but does not detonate. Then a missile the size of a fire extinguisher crashes through the window. Sensation & look of thousands of tiny stinging tick-sized black ants all over me.

Then I’m somewhere underneath the Tappan Zee bridge, at water level, debris everywhere. Manhattan side is frozen. A Tsunami-sized wave comes in from the west side of the Hudson. As it crashes in, I think about my son, who can’t swim. Intolerable sadness. I give in to the idea of dying, and am almost relieved.

I am -- as a matter of fact -- in the throes of publishing my book 'Poussin's Humour'. The book already has an author's preface. However, in the dream -- and none of the following is fact -- two prefaces have now to be included, one each by two men, who have information about the long frustrating history of the project that leads to the book. The book is now swelling until it becomes a novel (of sorts), with my original manuscript in the middle of these various accounts. I have agreed to this gladly.

One preface is already written, the other, by a man who has just won Lotto, has run into difficulties. I have to talk to my co-author urgently about the difficulties. After a long search I locate him. He is sitting under a low wooden overhang outside a building. He tells me he cannot talk to me now, he has to look after a partly incapacitated adolescent for some time yet. He agrees to meet me after 2 pm.

I start to go up the hill -- it's about half a mile -- because I have to teach until 2 pm. I take a different route from usual. I set out at a speed but soon realise I will have to slow down, if I'm to reach the top. On the way I meet a man who used to be one of my students nearly thirty years ago. His hair is grey and he is smartly dressed, a lawyer perhaps. He goes into a building on the right of the street and I go with him. We meet someone coming out who tells us this is the Fine Science building, in the same way that we talk about Fine Arts. My former student begins to tell me how his generation's drugs of choice were not marijuana, but pharmaceuticals easily available either off the shelf or by theft. That must have been 1980, or maybe 1979, I suggest, thinking of the sociology and the history of student drug-taking, and he confirms that suggestion.

reading a pad with writing by an unnamed man, middle-aged or older, bearded,

a painter, Italian. It's in English. Word, Phrase. Two words, maybe. A few words

on each line ..... 'barefoot' ..... something sad, something else said. Again ...'barefoot'.

It's a video image. His bearded face and half length, above an advertising hoarding

with red edge & yellow panel ...... 'no erectile tissue' ..... His hands out of sight behind

the hoarding, moving. He invites five women to write on a white page. There are

five # 4 sable brushes in a water-pot. Unasked, I write a page with one of the brushes,

mixing some colour with a lot of white. This is how I must write, as he had.

I am a witch, along with another woman who seems to be my sister. We live in a cabin in the woods, and we control the elements by swinging on a large wooden swingset. We don't want other people to discover where we live, because they would ask too many things of us. My sister and I are happy in our cabin until one day when she thinks it would be a good idea to call Death in. I am afraid at first but then I see that Death is just a door: it looks like the plastic storage shed in our back yard, but narrower, just wide enough for a person to stand inside. I enter it and see that it leads to another world that looks very different from our own but is full of the same people, only none of them remember their previous existence. I come back to this world tired of existence and feeling an aching need to end the cycle, to remember, to wake up from this long dream.

I’m sitting at a table beside my father’s uncle, Archie, who died in 1985. We each have a full mug of coffee that’s much too hot to drink. My mug is the heavy glass one I usually use for tea. His is the shiny black one a friend gave me a few years ago. We switch mugs. Now the coffee is much cooler. We switch back. Hot again. I say, “It looks like someone is trying to tell us something.” Archie smiles. Obviously, that someone is him.

Night after night for months now I've had a variation of the same dream. I'm in a school. I'm usually the teacher. The whole world has come. We learn in rooms of windows but no door and no walls. We are speaking in a language that no one has heard before but which everybody understands. There is one moment of a high wind blowing and one moment of sunlight brightening more and making the scene hard to make out.

There are more women than there are men.

There is an animal -- usually a four-legged animal.

At some point in the dream, somebody always comes back to life and someone won't come into the room.

I was on one side of a graveled road, my brother was on the other. Behind him was an old dormant filbert grove. I was holding a baseball bat. He threw me a perfect pitch, and I hit the ball deep into the grove. He ran off to look for it. The ball had hooked to the right, so I started walking in that direction down the road. After I’d walked about half a mile, I came to a restaurant. My brother was there. He said he couldn’t find the ball. There was a short line of people waiting to scrub their hands at a shiny metal sink. Behind the counter, my daughter was on a gurney, about to have a baby. I had no idea she was expecting. I hurriedly washed my hands. Somehow, even though I had never seen them before, I assumed the people ahead of me were her in-laws. There were no towels. I shook the water from my hands. I went behind the counter. My daughter was gone. A nurse told me they had taken her in already. I went back and washed my hands a second time. I went outside, and after walking a few feet across a wet lawn, I realized my hair and beard were covered with thick white spider webs. The more of them I removed, the more there were. I came to the corner of another building. I noticed something shiny by the foundation. When I bent down to look at it, a bright-green spider crawled into my hair.

After Reading Seduction of the Minotaur

I met a woman who was French and young. We met in a second hand clothing store. She was trying on a plaid jacket that I had just brought in to the store a short time before. The store was going to sell it for much more than I thought they would or than it was worth. She told a friend in French that she would buy the jacket and then bring it back, complaining that this and that was wrong with it, and that way she would get part of her money back. I seemed to understand what she was saying in French and tried to say something to her, also in French. She corrected my French saying that my verb was an old-fashioned way of saying something, no longer in use. I tried to say what she was saying to me—to repeat the French phrase after her with the correct accent. Since however my French was not expert, I had no way of knowing if what she was saying to me was correct in the first place.

Then the two of us walked around the store for a long time. In the course of those few hours I met two different men who were her husbands. One was young and black and held a child on his shoulders. The other was heavy-set, dressed casually and much older. He seemed to have a secret of some sort, because they made signals to each other about what they were doing. Finally the young woman suggested that we make an appointment to meet at another time. She said that since this meeting had gone on for so long it must have been an indication that we were compatible. Finally, we ended up sitting in a corner on a wooden bench, spending even more time talking, but I don’t know in what language. Then as we sat there we watched a guy put oil on his body and attach little silver candy balls all over him in neat rows, those little silver balls that can decorate cakes. We were above him and could see him from our bench. Then quite unexpectedly he was able to eat part of his arm without hurting himself. We could see his left-over arm, kind of jagged.

Woke up at 6 AM from dreams of a semi-rural dinner party, and the man on the radio predicting 6-9 inches of snow this weekend.

I am in a place that looks and feels familiar. The air here is thick, almost gelatinous, and it, too, feels familiar. I sit at a round table in the corner of a room painted creamy yellow and filled with light. Although I am right-handed, a pen is poised in my left. There is a large sheet of paper on the table before me, and it is filled with strange words made with letters I don't fully recognize, though I apparently wrote them. There is an extravagant aloe vera plant in a round terra cotta pot, and nothing else. A bird sings urgently outside.

A phone rings. Suddenly the receiver is in my left hand instead of the pen. I look at the caller i.d., which says "Neruda." I am astonished, and wonder how and why Neruda would be calling me from beyond the grave. I hesitate for a moment, then press the "talk" button. The sound on the other end is scratchy and distant. A barely audible male voice speaks my name, then something else I have trouble hearing or understanding. The only word I recognize, or perhaps remember, is "estilo," as in "stylus," and also "style." The line goes dead. I marvel at having heard Neruda's voice like that.

On the table in front of me now is a glass jar containing colorful fragments of vitrified tile decorated with glyphs and designs. A bright azure blue is the color that stands out most. I awaken here and remember the Spanish word for "tile" - "azulejo". "Azulejo," I say, "azulejo," again and again.

I dreamed the night before last that I needed to reach the top of a tall building, some forty stories high. The lift had broken down and I needed to climb at least the last set of stairs on foot. In my mind’s eye I could see the top level of stairs and to my horror they were not ordinary stairs, the enclosed solid stairs you find in stairwells alongside the lift. These were metal stairs with thin railings that wound around and up to the ceiling. From these stairs you could look down and see below to where you had come from. I could not climb these stairs. I would be giddy on such stairs. I would feel constantly fearful of falling. I could not make my journey to the top.

Then tonight I dreamed among other dreams I no longer remember that I was having dinner with an old colleague, Simone. She had invited another colleague Antoinette to join us at dinner. I am not aware that the names of these people seemed significant during the dream itself but the moment I woke up I knew that these were the women in my dream.

We were eating our meal at the top of a stair well on the landing. Out of nowhere, unprovoked it seemed, Antoinette threw herself over the stair rail into the void below. She fell down several flights and I knew she would be dead when we reached her body at the foot of the stairs. Dead she was, though her body was not smashed up, simply inert. Simone seemed to know more than I about why Antoinette had jumped. To Simone it seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But I was troubled.

Birds on the List

I've had two dreams of note
in the last couple of weeks
and only one I can remember right now
which I don't think is a dream in the sense
of some visual dream narrative
but some context of anxiety
I'm in a professional hockey game
sitting on the bench in full uniform
any second now the coach is gonna tell me go
and then I'll jump over the boards
but I can't skate very well at all
and I'm super embarrassed but I try to follow the puck
but I can barely move
and I know i'm gonna get drilled
by some little punk from grade school
who I never liked and was always better than
it's basically the same dream
as the one where you're sitting in class with only your underwear on
which is a pretty powerful sentiment
I mean sometimes I spend half my time
worrying to myself that I'm a fraud
and the other half proving i'm not

the other dream is better
it's deeper somehow and prizmatic
it's beautiful and special
but I can't remember it
I think it had something to do with war
I dreamt at least once maybe twice
I didn't want to forget it
I went around looking for it talking to friends
asking Becky if she remembered me talking about it
and she didn't
but she told me to write about
all the birds I should be so lucky to see
the birds on my list
the ones I've seen
and the ones I'm dreaming to see
and then it hit me, the dream

I was standing in total darkness
when this spectacular bird appeared and flew in front of me
looked at me squarely from the side of its head
it was a heron, large with a long and sharp beak
it had this incredible yellow streak on its crown
and I immediately misidentified it as a yellow-crown night heron
because behind it was black as night
with flashes of yellow and orange along it's crest
but it was almost uniformly blue
enormous
and absolutely unfazed by my presence
a simply beautiful dream
that failed to resound enough
for me to remember it

but I remember wondering when I woke up
if that kind of heron may exist in the world
and if not in the world
it exists now and I'm happy to see it
forget about it and remember it again
and have a chance to describe it

usually how it works is this
you look through the bird books and see the picture
or the peterson or sibley drawing
you try to figure out what time of year you might find it
and in what kind of environment
and then you have to be persistent in looking
but even then you have to be lucky
and if you find the bird it's truly uplifting
its forms a direct and unmitigated convergence of natural histories
the bird's and the birder's
but what of the dream birds, the abstract birds
the pest birds that follow humans
living off waste following the interstates
I won't forget seeing certain birds for the first time
american and least bittern, green heron, bald eagle
or seeing thousands of canada geese at Oak Orchard Swamp
they have been poetic moments

I almost forgot my dream night-heron
but now I won't
writing this poem while hanging out with friends all day today
and having the dream heron come back to mind
and making it public
skating out to center ice getting booed because i can barely move on skates
hoping to make a little something real out of the world
into the world

Looking out across this vast urbanscape, reminiscent of São Paulo, concrete high rises as far as the eye can see, I wonder how it's come to this. I'm very high up, on the open-sided top floor of a building undergoing further construction to make it taller still. In fact a good number of the buildings seem to be undergoing similar upward construction, evidenced by the huge cranes on top that swing around dropping steel girders into place with a clang. A fierce wind blows, giving me the sensation that if I don't retreat into the lower, finished section of the building, I'll blow right off the top.

I'm inside now, but a more imminent danger threatens. I'm on the hit list of some sinister agency that's hunting down dissenters and "disappearing" them. This, it turns out, is part of the purpose of the cranes on top of the buildings - the crane arms swing around and pluck dissenters out of the buildings, then deliver them to the head of the agency, a shadowy figure who inhabits one of the buildings.

A dark-haired woman in a white blouse and gray skirt comes rushing in. She speaks to me in Portuguese, telling me to come quickly. I follow her to another floor below that has no windows. It is dark, damp-smelling, and apparently safe, at least for now. She tells me to wait here, then rushes out as quickly as she appeared. I wait quietly in the dark, my heart pounding. The only sound now is that of my own breathing. I awaken here, and the sense of menace slowly dissipates.

last night: was very excited & curious to find self in n korea. wandered around among a lot of buildings atop huge hills, led to by vast gray sets of stairs. perfect & gorgeous constructivist-style pyongyang extending in all directions. then the thought, "but I warned Qingshan not to come to north korea, because what if he couldn't leave?" became concerned that I'd be mistaken for a spy. then met a deranged middle-aged american women holding a bundle of wild-colored balloons afoot some govt ministry building. can't remember what she said, but unsettling. first two things I saw when I woke up: (1) text message Qingshan had sent me in the night from china, which read "This truly is a huge, huge country with a long, long history"; (2) news reports of Obama's speech about nk rockets.

My son and I were watching what appeared to be a very large black TV screen. On it they were diagramming a new NASA project, a space station for actors. We watched as the house where the actors would live out in space, glided inside another glass structure that was something like a glass box. The house and the box were both made entirely of glass. I commented to my son that the glass was for the sake of a 360 degree view in outer space.

Then we were standing outside the glass house, waiting for a tour. Another person came up to join us for the tour. Quite suddenly he was inside and we were still outside. We knocked on the glass wall saying—you forgot us. The NASA scientist said he couldn't let us in. I screamed back at him, at the top of my lungs—and what are we, chopped liver?

"Hold out your hand," I say. "I have what you need." My directness alarms you.



I hold up my left hand, and a liquid red cord spills from my fingertips. "See - a scarlet penumbra," I say, drawing out the "num" and feeling the palpability of the syllable on my tongue.



I drop the cord into your open right palm. Although you say nothing, I can see that its substantial weight and warmth surprise you. I take one end and wrap it around your little finger.



"There," I say emphatically, "you know what to do," and awaken here.

I was with my son J, and friend D. and two Black ladies on the subway traveling around the city carrying a large cumbersome television, suitcases and one of the ladies seem to be in a wheel chair contraption with many straps. At first we seemed to be in the Rockaways, sense of being lost, underground, tired. Then, in a playground somewhere in Brooklyn. J wanted to hang out with a group of teens. I vaguely promise him "later." There is an idea to go to the Baseball Hall of fame which involves at least two more transfers to trains, uncertainty about exactly where it is; much dragging of our suitcases, the TV etc. We are on Metro North and I see from the window apartments made of crushed, recycled glass much compacted with tower, spire like structures like Rodia or Gaudi . Everything is glittering, bright. I keep saying I don't know where I am. Uncertainty as to whether we are in the Bronx or out of the city by the Hudson. We are then in a taxi driving uptown near Columbia Univerisity, an area unknown to me but often present in dream. We go down a very hilly street with cobblestones lined with small, almost quaint Korean restaurants. Sense of a new discovery of a part of the city I hadn't seen before. We see a kind of flea market or kiosks under tenting near a cathedral hidden in the shadows. Another often dreamt of, unseen building. I seem to have to walk very carefully around gates made of glass beads, everything precarious but fascinating. Lots of amethyst jewelry,crystals on tables. I realize the cathedral, which opens into the market, is of "The Scientific Americans" or "Christian Scientists." Realize that I need to investigate their religion more seriously. People seem to practice by going into darkened rooms with carpeted benches and then lie down with backs on the benches and feet on the floor in neat rows and then talk in low voices to one another about their feelings and spiritual process. Have an association with this cathedral and "Faberge Eggs."

A small gathering of slender, naked beings ... human perhaps, or distant star relatives ... the sound of an acoustic guitar gently being strummed ... I arrive at the upper edge of an immense stadium ... the seats are empty ... the music is coming from the stage far below ... I begin the long way down.

I’m standing in the graveled driveway in front of the house where I grew up when a kitchen on wheels pulls in. It has trailer house sides, but no steering wheel or windshield; the front end is a counter. Behind the counter is a friendly long-haired young couple I know from somewhere. They definitely know me. I say, “Welcome back.” The man offers me a cup of coffee. I say, “Coffee?” and the woman sighs and says, “Yes, that’s all we have this year.” After they give me the coffee, the man hands me three or four filtered cigarettes and a hand-rolled one that won’t stay together. I end up with loose tobacco in my hand.

Soon, a small crowd gathers, and we are inside the kitchen in a little sitting room behind the counter. I can’t find my coffee. A stranger points to a paper cup sitting on the window ledge. Through the ledge I can see the pine tree in our front yard. I notice then that I still have the cigarettes in my hand, and a new book of matches with several extra flaps, which are glossy-beige and unfold in opposite directions. Wondering if there is an advertisement for a correspondence course inside, I pry open the flaps. The inside cover is blank. I strike a match, but it goes out before I can light the cigarette. I try two more times, but a breeze coming through the window blows out the matches. Finally, I succeed. The cigarette has no flavor whatsoever.

Someone, I don’t know who, mentions the fact that the vineyards in the area are budding out beautifully this spring. Hearing this, I suddenly remember that I have completely forgotten to prune ten acres of vines along the north side of the property. I feel horribly guilty about this. Puffing on my flavorless cigarette, I realize that the only way I can possibly prune ten acres of vines is if I quit writing and prune like a madman for eight or nine hours a day to keep the vineyard from going to ruin. I am torn between what I should do and what I must do. I wake up thinking, “another vineyard dream.”

I dreamed of those this morning. Big sci-fi python-type snakes. I had a hose that I was using to spray the path I was walking so I wouldn't slip. A snake coiled up my hose forcing me to abandon it. I kept walking without my hose and then a smaller snake in a bush bit me in the arm. Ouch. I felt it when I woke up.

In this dream there was a veterinarian office, which was also my dentist, two distinct visits to my dentist, brightly colored foamy substance all over the dentist's office that was attributed to an exploding squirrel, a very suspicious nurse who interrogated me as to why I was in waiting room, a guy with drinking straws poking out of the skin on his face, two poets, one of whom I had to make clear I AM NOT PLAYING FOOTSIES, and the other showed me a gift that I hoped was for me, but was really for his daughter, a school bus with strange graffiti that used to belong to the Obama campaign, an irresponsible man who was supposed to be my father and made me late to my first dentist appointment, a book review magazine that I already read, women folk not wanting to sit next to one another, an ugly green outfit, plans for a family photo shoot and a wild accusation that I bought a dog brush.

The children showed me where to lie down on the grass. Then they covered me with a sheet and told me to guess which of them was touching me. I felt little fingers on my head, then on the tip of my nose, on my knees, through my shoes ... and then, suddenly, the sheet was pulled away and a friend of mine said he wanted me to write something for the little newspaper he was publishing.

I was both watching and/or were
an Art dealer
of painters older aging
gifted but forgotten
disguised among musty spattered rooms
paying them merely the not too low

this dealer sees the death
of his secret favorite
HALO
over a honeymoon

his paintings brought to market, reluctant
some still in jars and in tears
to his core they spoke
knowing this worlds most misunderstood
these treasures
were fortunate
saved in a vault of these friends
paint from yesterday’s blood
from the previous dream

It should be understood this happens
22 months after the fact

Here came together my life's multiple basements
One friend wondered where his stuff vanished
There had been the flood
Another protested never allowed a move there
i had to explain two fathers
a step and real whose power over had banished them

Then there was the blood of my murdered friend
dried upon floor thick and crumbled
left till the completed investigation-now over
cleaning with the too small towel
returned liquidity I was watched
spread sunk blacken scumble edged
beneath a sink of too high
and out of reach of cleansing water

i don't know, Laura Moriarty was there...we were standing in a group on the field at Woodside Elementary in Concord...Brandon Brown was probably there, but sort of as a black amorphous blob...and then suddenly a young Ron Silliman walks up...and he looks exactly like Michael Koshkin...he's handsome, and short...he has five o'clock shadow and a fade...he's wearing stylish black rimmed glasses...i think to myself "wow, i'm like 3 actual feet taller than young Ron Silliman"...and then Moriarty is talking about her poetics and i'm mouthing over Brandon Brown cum black amorphous blob's shoulder "it's young Ron Silliman...this is fucking crazy...young Ron Silliman is here..." but Moriarty doesn't quite get what i'm saying, looks at me confused, and keeps on talking about her poetics...and now we're walking down Pierce St. in front of my building...and it's raining...and i get a running start and slide a few feet on the slick pavement...i'm sort of showing off...and then from behind me comes young Ron Silliman sliding down the street...only he slides a lot farther than i did...and he suddenly looses control, falls back and hits his head on the pavement...and he goes limp...and he keeps sliding down the block...and now i notice a thick trail of blood on the pavement...and i run up to young Ron Silliman and he's dazed and bleeding profusely from the head...and i see that young Ron Silliman has cracked his skull pretty bad...and now i'm taking him into my apartment and wrapping his head in a bath towel...and the blood is soaking through the towel...and i think young Ron Silliman is dying...and suddenly i'm thinking about Natasha Richardson and i'm getting really scared for young Ron Silliman which makes me think about my 7th grade teacher...and how her and her husband went to Tahoe for the weekend on a ski trip...they went to Alpine Meadows which is where i used to ski as a kid...and that was the week she had been teaching us about poetry...we wrote haiku, persona poems, we attempted sonnets...i wrote a haiku about a bloody knife, and a sonnet about my grandma's soft skin...and then later we learned that my teacher's husband had been in an accident...he'd collided with a tree that weekend...and he'd died...and now i'm standing in my bathroom on a rainy night with young Ron Silliman who's bleeding from the head thinking about my 7th grade teacher's husband who died in a skiing accident and i can't remember her name...and i'm remembering all of this this morning driving to work listening to A Confederacy of Dunces on CD thinking about Ron Silliman's review of Jared Hayes's RecollecTED which came out at the end of our time together at Naropa which made me think about drinking beers with Michael Koshkin on his porch in Boulder writing silly drunk poems about Ted Berrigan's saggy scrotum based on a postcard of Berrigan in his underwear stuck to Koshkin's refrigerator...and then i thought, oh yeah, young Ron Silliman, he looked exactly like Michael Koshkin in my dream last night...

George Quasha is hosting a call-in radio contest in which he recites a line of verse from a well-known poem, then challenges listeners to call in with the correct next line of verse. The first person who calls in with the correct response gets a prize, plus a crack at another poetry challenge with a more obscure poem.

I'm at home listening to the program on the radio, but somehow simultaneously seeing George doing the program in the radio studio, as if the very act of listening allows me to see everything, which feels perfectly natural to me.

So I'm sitting here listening/seeing, and George begins the first challenge with the following line of verse, which he says is from Shakespeare:
"If your true love you find not..."

He gives out the call-in number (a variation on his waking life number, with a different area code), and waits for the calls to come in.

I know instantly what the correct second line of verse is:

Try, try again"

I grab the phone to call. But things keep going wrong: first the light on the handset goes out, so I can't finish punching in the number and have to start over; now the line suddenly goes dead; now I press the wrong number and have to start over, and on and on. At first I'm feeling anxious and frustrated by all these stymied attempts to get through, but this feeling suddenly gives way to a recognition of the absurdity of it all. I start laughing even as I keep trying to call, then really start cracking up when alternative second lines start popping into mind spontaneously as alternatives to the "correct" one.

The only one I remember now is:
"If your true love you find not..."
"For godssake, just look out the damn window"

Soon I'm laughing so hard I can't even try to punch in the number anymore. I laugh myself awake.

I was on a charterd bus from Kent to Washington DC. we were going to a rally & march advocating trying Bush/Cheney for war crimes. also on the bus were friends from my university days & Elizabeth Taylor. I askd the actress if she'd ever been on a bus before. she sd "once. at an airport."

I dreamed this morning that I was growing all these extra toes. They were a little shorter than my other toes kind of budding up in between. Seven total on the right foot and eight on the left, I think.

I'm at what must be a zoo watching these strange animals that are perfectly round. They have big saucer-like eyes and walk upright on long, skinny legs with knobby knees. I can't figure out what they are, and from my vantage point I can't even tell if they have fur or feathers. It almost looks as if they're in a husk, which makes them look more like coconuts on stork legs than either birds or mammals. They're strutting about, and disconcertingly silent, as there's no sign of either beak or mouth from which they might utter a sound. Something seems really off about them, and I feel vaguely disoriented just looking at them, though nobody else seems to be affected so.

As I start to walk away I see there are some discarded "husks" from the creatures behind their enclosure, so I go over to investigate. Even as I look more closely, I can't tell if they really are natural husks, or costumes made out of papier machê. I start imagining that it's all a hoax, and that the "animals" in the enclosure are really miniature circus people dressed in these round husks, and that they're walking on stilts. But wait - stilts with knee joints? I wake up not knowing.

This morning I dreamed that my husband and I were attending a series of events held on the corner of Toorak and Tooronga Roads near to where we live. The venue on the open street overlooked the city in the distance and had the walled construction site of the new Tooronga shopping centre as its backdrop.

The woman conducting proceedings was a dark haired, pretty young thing, with Mediterranean eyes and glossy hair. She spoke from a pulpit set up on the nature strip. She came across as part evangelist, part singer and performer, and part newsreader. She tended to begin her performance with a serious introduction, some news of the world, a type of exhortation to live a good life, and then moved into a comic musical routine that appeared to win the hearts of her audience.

I was sceptical myself. I did not trust her. There was also a serious older man who stood by and occasionally spoke. He was the moderator, the one who kept things on track. The audience sat on the other side of Toorak Road. Someone had stopped all the traffic for these events.

On our second visit to hear the woman speak, my husband and I went for a walk mid proceedings through local side streets. For no apparent reason my husband stopped mid step. He was upset. By the time we arrived back at our car in readiness for a resumption of proceedings, he had become even more distressed and was visibly crying. He took a call on his Blackberry. I only managed to hear the tail end of his conversation.

‘Thanks, Elaine,’ he had said.

‘Who’s she?’ I asked. My husband told me then the story of how he had been having terrible and recurrent nightmares. Nightmares that were set in some place like the United Arab Emirates in which some dignitary, a Sheik or some such person, would cut out the rib cages of young women and leave them to bleed to death. The dreams were horrific and my husband said he could not bear them any longer. He wanted to do something about them, to understand them, and for this reason he had contacted the young woman who was at this moment at her pulpit performing. Elaine was her assistant. My husband considered that the performer was like a psychologist and he had made arrangements to see her that afternoon.

‘Fair enough,’ I said. I opened the car door to go back to the performance, but I was worried about leaving a large flat tray of melted ice cream on the back seat near where my husband was now sitting. I was fearful the ice cream might spill or that my husband might fall into it.

I went to resume my seat on the nature strip with the rest of the audience. My husband would listen to the performance from the car, he said. Then he asked me through the open window,

‘Was I happy?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I was happy enough. I wondered whether he might be wondering about the affair I had had some time ago that was now over and whether this young woman he planned to visit that afternoon would in turn fall in love with him. All young women fall in love with my husband, I thought – his gentleness to strangers, his sharp intelligence and his wit.

My husband sat in the back seat of the car crying. His skin looked tanned and he seemed to have lost weight. His skin almost shone with good health but he looked so unhappy.

‘Your happiness,’ he said to me, ‘is a Baptist type happiness’. I did not understand his words, (I still don’t) but I was struck by the strange way religious references had crept into our otherwise almost religion free lives. My memory of the dream ends here.

On a school campus on the edge of a sidewalk I find a baby that at first looks like a doll. His neck is very extended and it appears to be decaying. I push the head down closer to the shoulders and this seems to help.

Later I am in the office where I usually work at my usual desk. Then I realize that my boss has left for good and so I move to his old desk and take my phone and all its cords and messages with me. To the side of his desk are many brown bags of his projects along with bags of trash. It is hard to tell which is which. I have a good laugh with the woman who is taking my desk when I finally get why she was sitting beside me. We start laughing in relief that we don’t have to work at the same desk that is way too small for two people.

Then at some point there is a girl in a blue sweater who comes running in to report that a student is causing problems by trying to lure snakes onto a blanket on the grass. The girl is hysterical and has a pockmarked face. It occurs to me that we can’t help her.

I’m in the kitchen, holding a large brown raw egg. I start peeling the egg. Bit by bit, the shell falls away, but the membrane stays intact. I handle the egg as carefully as I can, but there’s one place where the membrane is torn. There’s a small frying pan on top of the stove, also a cardboard box full of old letters. The refrigerator opens; a gust of air lifts empty bread wrappers from the countertop. They land on the cold burners. I wonder how I’m supposed to fry an egg under these circumstances. A woman standing nearby says I’m not supposed to fry it, I’m supposed to see how long I can hold it. Now, through the tear in the membrane, I see a dark red flower.

Waking from a nightmare, in bed beside you, I explained it to you. We had been detained, held hostage in a ‘haunted’ house. Officers of the Gestapo were there, experimenting on our bodies. They had tortured our friends, carving ritualistic figures into their backs. There were two ghosts patrolling the building. Grey, blurred men with heartless expressions. Soldiers in uniform, killed in some distant conflict. I could hear them speaking to me, could hear their voices behind the walls. We broke out of the window, running through the suburbs at dusk. Soon we emerged into open cornfields, but the grey men were there already, like sentries or sentinels. We needed to leap onto a moving freight train, to evade the ghosts, to escape. The dream ended there, leaving me suspended, somewhere between entrapment and release. Upon waking I told you, ‘I don’t know whether we escaped.’ You turned over and looked at me. ‘We must have done,’ you said. ‘We’re here now, aren’t we?’ I stopped and thought. If we had been caught, perhaps neither of us would have woken up at all.

An old truck hauling firewood has lost its load in the snow. The truck is parked by the curb, facing uphill. There are disinterested people walking by in dark coats and hats. The driver points to a low flat empty trailer behind the truck, and says he’d be happy if the wood were put on the trailer. I volunteer. He thanks me, then climbs into the cab. The wood is white. It blends with the snow. I pick up as much of it as I can find and put it on the trailer. Before long, the pieces I’m picking up are only the outside bark portion. I find them by locating their eyes, which look up at me through a layer of ice. I handle them carefully, because I think they might be ancient tribal masks. Finally, I give up. The driver is asleep. I walk into a building, thinking it’s a bank. Instead, it’s a little bar with very simple tables. Everyone is drinking the same thing, a non-alcoholic clear fluid served in six-ounce juice glasses. Everyone is happy. About three tables away, my mother is chatting and laughing with an elderly woman I don’t know. They’re having a wonderful time. She looks my way without recognition. I’m joined by a friend. He’s holding one of the drinks. He says it’s time to leave. I follow him around one corner and down some steps. The walls are made of orange clay. As we reach the bottom of the steps, he almost collides with a young boy, but he doesn’t spill his drink. The boy is no longer a boy, but a navy man in a fancy uniform. He passes by us without saying a word. I ask my friend if he’d like to go somewhere and have a real drink. He says no, he had far too much to drink the night before. I realize then that I don’t even remember the night before. It makes me wonder what else I don’t remember.

A friendly butcher is standing behind a high glass case stacked with steaks and birthday cakes. I hand him a flat box that holds a manuscript, but he thinks it’s a job application, and says the store owner will call me in a few days for an interview.

I'm living in France; I'm in the first stages of an affair with an alluring but down-to-earth mademoiselle. She tells me that she has just sent a letter that spoke of me to an old high school teacher with whom she has maintained a friendship. The letter said various things that made me sound like a fun & charming person--one is that I have a twelve-year-old's enthusiasm for roller-skating. Jokingly I ask, "did you suggest that I am inclined to lend money to high school teachers?"

SLEEPING THROUGH THE NIGHT

I’m keeping a notebook on the bed beside me. I dream about it and it is the pressure I need to jot down my dreams. What actually happens is that each time I think I’m waking up, I review my dream to that point, over and over again. It begins with a group of us are going to Santorini for vacation. When we arrive I have to fill in the names and addresses of at least 2 couples in the party who have not yet arrived. My address book is not up to date so I make up the contact information of the other two couples.

Then we are taken to our room that is so large that we end up sharing it with another couple. We discover that we have a big-window view of a landscape that looks like the Grand Canyon, but not like the island of Santorini. I notice that the bedspread is beige with small red flowers on it. Soon we go outside to get in line for dinner in a restaurant. Dinner on an island is always in an outdoor restaurant. A woman beside me tells the story of a restaurant mascot that is a cross between a vinyl figurine and a rabbit. I can see the mascot myself. This mascot has recently had a back operation and is now healthy. Other people in the line don’t like the woman who is telling the mascot story and so most of them move away from her. I stay and listen to her story and don’t think she is crazy. We never get to eat dinner anyway.

Then there is something like a parade in the streets and so we stand against a chain link fence to watch, It is not clear who is on the inside and who is on the outside of the fence. Soon a young man waltzes up to the fence wearing a long flowing black coat. The fabric is silky and quilted. He also wears a hat and has a small white flower in his lapel. In my dream I am continuously reviewing my dream so that I end up sleeping through the whole night without waking once. This is the first time that reviewing a dream has kept me asleep.

It’s spring, and a stranger and I are hoeing weeds around the vine stumps in the last row of the vineyard near the road that runs past my childhood home. As we move along, the soil rises up and threatens to engulf the vines, which are still bare despite the time of year. Our job becomes more and more strenuous; finally, instead of dirt and weeds, we’re hacking away at snow, then solid ice. It’s hard work, but I’m having fair success. I’m less bothered by the strangeness of the situation than I am by the fact that I don’t know who the stranger is.

Dreamovie 83

Someone is bringing me turtles for a biological experiment. He leaves them in a mud puddle by the side of the road, and they disappear into the mud. When I am ready to use them, I pull the turtles out of the mud, but I decide to dig more deeply into the mud, and I find other turtles there, turtles that have been living there. I find the turtles by feel and then I pull them up out of the mud. As I pull them, the suction of the mud pulls their shells apart, so that the top shell I'm holding onto disengages with the bottom shell, but this does not harm the turtles. I am amazed by how many turtles I'm finding, some of them down so far that the mud is more like solid earth.

As I work on this project, a Latino artist comes up to me and watches me work. I do not know if he talks to me, but I decide that we can use these turtles in an art project where we paint the bottoms of the turtles with wild designs. For a second, my mind goes to a study of painting turtles undershells which proved that the beasts are not harmed by this. The artist seems to think I am racist, so I explain to him that I have a beautiful Asian wife. (The artist has suddenly become Asian.) For a second, my mind goes to my Asian wife, who is standing by the island in our darkened kitchen. I wonder who this wife of mine is, since Nancy isn't Asian and we do not have an island in our kitchen.

I take the turtles to a building where we will work with them, but once I get there I find myself in charge of a project to print and assemble a literary publication. The book has one sheet that is longer that the rest, and the photocopier cannot collate that page with the rest of the pages, so I have to take each copy of that sheet and insert it near the front of the publication. Then I have to sew each page into the publication by hand.

I move the copies of the publication into a nearby room, where a number of women and children are sitting in a circle, but I keep moving back and forth between the two rooms, never quite able to bring everything I need to complete the project into the next room. My old friend Ruth is one of the people in the circle, and she is there with her two girls, who appear not to have aged at all in the past twenty years.

The women and children sit in a circle, but in clusters of women with their own children. As I move back and forth, Kathleen and Ray talk to me about the project, which is a poetry project in my mind, but an archives project in theirs.

An old forgetful LBJ is speaking in a narrow hallway filled with lights and reporters. On a table nearby is a plastic water pitcher and several plastic glasses. I pour myself some water. LBJ looks at me and his speech drifts onto the subject of baseball. I know he should be addressing the reporters, not me. He becomes lost in thought. I offer him my water. He thanks me, says no, and apologizes for being old. Just then, a friend of mine, who turns out to be one of the reporters, tells me that the two of us have to take a bus to another story. After a very short bus ride, we get off at an old rundown lot. My father is there, standing next to a wooden framework of some kind. I have no idea what it's for, and he's too discouraged to tell me. It's quite a bit taller than we are. "Maybe it's for a new swing set," I think.

Dreamovie 82

Nancy and I are stopped at the top of a large mountain beside a highway that plummets alongside a gigantic cliff that is part of this mountain. I am amazed at what we can see from this vantage point and how much better it is than one we have just had, a vantage point already mostly forgotten. We can see most of New York State from this point on the mountain, a point either on the northern edge of the state or just beyond it. The highway descends towards Buffalo where it turns left and east, and I can see the highway, which must be the New York State Thruway, continuing until it meets an accumulation of buildings in the middle of the state, which must be Syracuse.

We descend the mountain and stop in Buffalo, where we attend a party of our friends Jim and Patti. It is the summertime, and their party is on Lake Erie, primarily on a large boat.

Nancy and I are now naked in a four-poster bed in a large white house by Lake Erie and she is telling me what kind of sex she prefers. My copy of the magazine P-Queue is sitting on a dresser atop my small brown stationery box beside a jar of Vaseline. I tell Nancy that I am worried about the Vaseline getting on the book.

We are outside on the deck of the boat talking to Jim, and Patti is coming over to talk to us. We discuss why their daughter Katie is not present.

Nancy and I are back in the white house. We are on the wide landing on the second floor, which is decorated with furniture including a chest of drawers upon which sits my copy of Queue. The area is filled with a number of older women who seem to be in charge of both the party and the house. Someone has moved our stuff, so that there is Vaseline globbed on my stationery box and my book. I'm upset and try to wipe it off of the book. There is not much Vaseline on the book, so I am not that worried (and I then realize this is a dream and that my book is probably untouched).

Nancy and I head out east across the state back home, but we are walking, not driving. When we get to Syracuse, which is only one hundred yards or so from the boat, we have to go straight through the city. And the city is now just a single small house. We enter the house through the wide front door, and we arrive just as the fireplace is being set in place so that we cannot go through the rest of the house. This happens, we learn, every day at noon. Once the wall in front of us closes and the fireplace appears, a group of state workers, including our quiet friend Robert, put together a small teatime and dance simple monochromatic dances to chamber music. We try to find another way through the house so that we can continue across the state, but there is no way through the house and no way around the house. We return to the room and talk to Robert as the dancing continues—until the fireplace opens and we can continue on our trip.

We finally arrive at home, back at our end of the state, where we are with a group of people all of whom have special handheld electronic devices. It is unclear what these devices do, but some nefarious people know how these will work against them so they attack us and steal the devices from us.

Many of us are captured during this attack, but I am one of those left behind. I am now second in charge at the FBI, and I am trying to figure out how to make the devices to work again. Somehow, this will foil the plans of those who stole the devices. I am working on this project beside a severe blonde woman who occasionally provides some help.

I go to speak to the first in charge, but everyone around him is speaking in Spanish, and my Spanish isn't good enough to allow me to join the conversation. I hold one of the devices beside the head of the first in charge to arouse his attention and to tell him something I have discovered. But I pull my hand away, because I have just realized that I don't recognize which one he is anymore.

I am a child, and I am alone inside this magnificent church. I know this church, this is where we held the Mass for my friend Tommy. I am kneeling in a pew off to the right side of the altar. A huge white column is situated between myself and the altar, obstructing my line of vision. A priest approaches the altar but he has disappeared behind the column, and although I can hear him speaking, I cannot hear the words to his prayer. I do not think he knows that I am there and I have the sense that I am spying on him. I am moving my jaw up and down, and as I do, my teeth are falling out of my mouth, one by one, into my hand which I hold beneath my chin to catch them. When my teeth are all out, I begin speaking: The light! As though it has passed through the tears of Christ, the tears which upon touching the earth are prismatic crystals. The light! As though it has passed through the blood of Christ, the blood which upon touching the earth is hyacinthine gems. The light! As though it has passed through the eyes of Christ, the eyes which upon touching the earth are gold dodecahedrons. The light! As though it has passed through the body of Christ, the body which upon touching the earth is pearl.

Dreamovie 81

AM has to move her office to be closer to her staff, which I understand, so we move her office to one of two offices between Julie and John K's (but in reality there are no offices between those two offices). Because AM is moving her office, I must move mine as well, though I have no idea why. We inspect our new offices, and I notice that there is a door between the two rooms, though I don't want one there. Her office has no door on the hallway, however. Instead there is evidence that the door that used to be there was a sliding door. I am annoyed that I have to leave my corner office for this office, and then I realize that these offices actually move AM away from her staff, I don't have to move my office, and this is only a dream.

A number of us are walking through the woods with canoes. I ask our leader if we are supposed to canoe downriver, even though I know we are standing beside a small lake. He says we are, so I head off with a few other people. We pull out canoes out of the water beside a parking lot and walk to the back of the lot, where we find an old cinderblock garage. I walk into the garage and it is dirty and moldy inside, cold, and I can see the snow speckling the ground outside. As I turn to leave the garage, I see that my entrance into the garage was through a small square hole in the wall and that I have to get on my hands and knees to exit the building. I did not remember having to do this to enter the building.

Dream One
The dream began with my husband wanting to pull the car in the driveway. He couldn’t because our neighbor to the right had his truck in our driveway and his leg in a kind of scaffolding apparatus that held his bones in place with pins and wires. When the neighbor saw us pull up, he rushed towards the truck, picking up blue plastic boxes that were full of vegetables. He stacked the boxes in the front seat of his vehicle that had no door. Of course they fell out all over the driveway and grass, so we pulled the car further up the street and parked there.

The house was full of young people who were under the influence of a local street vendor. When I realized that he knew nothing that would be of help to them, I hustled him out and although he plead his case, I didn’t believe him. He took his ice cream cart and left as I watched through the window. The window were trimmed with aluminum and swung out on a hinge.

One of the young men, a friend of my son’s showed me his delicate palms. They were decorated in henna patterns. One of his hands had a red eye in the middle of one finger. His hands appeared to be partially erased. He held them up for a long time and they seemed to be disintegrating as I stared at them. He was wearing a blue pin striped suit and I knew he was thinking of me as “mother.” Later, there seemed to be some confusion about who would do what in the young people’s business.

Dream Two
A friend and I were both in the hospital at the same time having babies. Hers baby was almost normal weight, but mine was a tiny, tiny male person, like a mite. He was so tiny that he slipped through a small hole in the top of the cradleboard where I swaddled him in blankets. I got down on my hands and knees to search for him and there I found many insects and creatures with beautiful feathery bodies and legs moving over the carpet, but I couldn’t find him because he was as small as a mite.

cramped space of kitchen after party dishes piled for washing by the sink getting late I want to get the washing-up done when some young round faced curly dark-haired boy holds forth seriously about the group playing a familiar song – is that Talking Heads singing a ballad that we know from someone’s album – Mary something – you know his daughter can’t remember his name …”I need to see you again” – tall thin girl gets up deciding to play my digital piano that is right by the sink – she wants to move the three empty bottles but I say they don’t go out until Monday, that they stay there until then – where, she asks, is the on-button

[missing names: Nora Jones, Ravi Shankar]

This was a dream of the future. Everyone had become much more hip hop in their dress and manner. My younger brother in particular now sported excessively baggy clothes that were bright powder blue, and had a visor to match. His girlfriend too wore a similar outfit. I met them in the kitchen of his third house, a house that was all granite countertops, yellow 70s-esque furniture decor and particle board. They announced their engagement after four months of dating, while friends covered them with gold chains.

There were many apartments in a row connected to each other by a series of regular passageways and banana-colored carpet. In some of these rooms people - still hip-hop people- were having sex. Outside there was danger. Roving gangs with automatic weapons would shoot up apartments on both sides of the street, including the ones my brother and his fiance were sleeping in, except that they weren't sleeping but playing some kind of yahtzee when the shooting started. No one was killed, but everything was full of bulletholes that leaked motor oil. One of my brother's friends informed me that all the sex was happening because 'people wanted to be sure some babies would survive the shootings.'

I recall walking around in something like a trucker's hat - I was non hip hop and poor but everybody treated me respectfully. On the tv there was a show on the president, and the president was this strange silvery-haired dude with a white lion by his side, and he read an address to the nation that was straight out of Temporary Autonomous Zone by Hakim Bey. A reporter on the scene, who somehow came into the room with us while he was talking on tv, told us that the president ran the country according to the Temporary Autonomous Zone, and since nobody read in the country any more, no one cared.

I had no AWP dreams while I was at AWP. I dreamed of an ocean, a loud television, an intervention, a little girl eating dirt and plants, recycling, finding a map, a school bus, an airplane, a spilled glass of wine and finding my gray bra and underwear in the kitchen of my childhood home.

& the story of the Lacedaemonian man and woman: she was set starkly in the tall grass with her shoulders squared aiming the rifle two miles up the hill at the stranger wandering into her land. Why is this the story that preludes the hospital? The land was the same: it's rolling hills of wheat and dense cliques of lush oaks in an amber sun of dusk. But why is she sick? My older friend (was it my father?) was trimming dust jackets, and we agreed that smoking cigarettes was the best while maintenancing a book collection. "Why did you just sit and not come over?" She'd asked. All the patients had giant cribs decorated like an inmate decorates his cell, the light was dim, the sceptic cardboard pungence of the hospital corridor was a haunted architecture striped yellow across blue walls, no private rooms, just the floor and sickness, debilitating injuries screaming echoes in the lamplight. I was terrified by all of it, and too distracted to have even seen Her, the only Love who'd left me years ago, sitting beside her own crib and eyeing my terror of the sickness she'd come into. But She'd been cured of it, whatever it was, and we were there to bring her home. Sydney must have been as distant a dream to her as it was to me, and she gives me a tour of the place, showing it in a new light. She loves it here and wants to show me why. Suddenly the place is bustling -- there are cyclists with angular physiques carrying their bikes up stairways, there's loud music thumping from certain doors, and she leads me into a great hall, as large as a high school gymnasium, lighted only by the cloudy windows drawing silver and shadowy daylight, and floored with waterproof wrestling mats. Above, they've turned on the sprinkler system and let it run continuously. The patients, twenty-five of them or so, run in the showers and slip on the mats, tossing footballs and asking us to join them, which we do and run in the shower and push each other over on the mats until we decide that its time to go, we've come to bring her home after all. & in the car with her father there was a dreadful listlessness, he had Black Flag playing on the radio and decided McDonalds would be a good choice, pulling into the parking spot. I said to her: I want things to go back to the way they were. & she said, No one's deepening anymore, we don't deepen on one another anymore. & I asked if that was all there was too it? 'You know as well as I do,' she said, eating a french fry, 'Neither of us really loved the other, we merely loved the affect the other aroused within us. It wasn't each other, it was ourselves we loved.' What was it that I wanted? I wanted her to say that I loved lamp, for her to laugh from the chest with her lips clenching an audible smile pointing a finger at me from beneath her chin, and for her to say the Lacedaemonian woman wasn't there as a prelude, but a prolepsis of an epilogue that would never be read.

Dreamovie 80

I am attending a Muslim funeral. I drive up to the mosque, which is nothing more than a large house on a small hill. As I walk towards it, it opens up and the ground before me fills with chairs, folding chairs, but elegant. People are seated in those chairs. I sit down for a second but almost as soon as I do I rise to go up to the front. I am just ahead of my father. I'm feeling bad because I know the dead man but not well. I am not sure I'm acting as I should since I've never been to such a funeral service. As I walk up to the man lying out on a table in a shallow casket, I have to pass by and talk to a few women who are standing in a group just before where he lies. Afterwards, my father and I walk to the back of the house, where cars are sitting in the snowy mud

I go to work, where many of us are sitting at tables working on developing displays for some event. As I arrive at the table where Denis is working on a display, the commissioner of my agency also arrives. Denis begins to read something to the commissioner, but it soon becomes clear that what he is reading is a song. I mention that, trying to diffuse a situation, and the commissioner agrees with me. For some reason, it seems to me that Denis is being almost impolite, but not exactly. He is being simply a little undeft in his manner around the commissioner. By this point, I am sitting down at the table with Denis, a display board standing up between us. We leave that area, walk down the hall, making a right hand turn where the hallway ends. I have picked up a nice cubic foot box, and I'm trying to remove the many telephone books and squished balls of tissue paper that are filling it. I have to place these in a large rolling gondola for recycling, but I first have to stuff the material into other weird sized boxes that are resting next to the gondola, including one that is a long but shallow rectangle.

We, though who we are is indistinct, are trying to escape from an old rich man. We have driven to the top of a building that has just been built. It is of a very simple design, but elegantly so. The roof is small but densely studded with antennas of all shapes and types. There are even antennas that lie flat on the surface of the roof. I see that one of the antennas ends in a thick metal lightning bolt, which I know is the antenna that my phone uses so I don't worry about reception. We are riding over the top of this small roof in a tiny van. As my brother Rick drives the van towards the edge of the roof, he says that we'll have a brief gentle fall. Then he drives off the room and we float gently down the four floors to the street. I see this take place from the point of view of someone perched on the edge of the roof even though I am in the van. One we land on the street below, we make a right turn at the corner of the building and turn into a steady stream of traffic.

We are still being chased by the rich man who is driving a very small car, one he barely fits in. We elude him for a bit, but later we realize that he is resting on the flat bed of a tractor-trailer between large crates filled with cargo. I see this as if I am floating above the truck, but I am in a van a couple of miles ahead of him at this point. The man's car is now a standard white toilet, and its bowl filled with water that does not leak out. He is resting beside the toilet as the truck follows us.

We find ourselves in a little Christian revival taking place beside a small pond in the woods. We have not been baptized, so they are preparing to baptize us but they are not sure we are ready for it. The old man arrives on the scene, so we are anxious to be baptized, or to enter the water and escape from him. The people begin to sing and file their way down an aisle created between their pews of folding chairs laid out upon a gentle slope and stopping right at the edge of the water. The people at the revival walk down the aisle carrying white computer keyboards that are actually complete computers. They hold them as if they were lyres or small harps. They are singling. Some place their computers on a seat and walk into the water, while others sit down and begin to type into their computers.

In the upper left-hand corner of an otherwise blank page is the word "Registration," and beneath that, in smaller type, there are three long strange words, stacked one upon the other. Just then, a telephone call arrives from my brother. He says our grandfather has taken a turn for the worse and is not expected to live. I hang up, thinking, "But Grandpa died years ago."

The front door of my childhood home opens and my mother comes outside. I see someone lurking by the road. He looks like he must be a salesman. He joins us. After mumbling something we can't understand, he says, "It operates entirely on Latin." I say, "What operates on Latin?" He says, "The pump." Then he goes into a long spiel about the quality of our water, and how his device is guaranteed to improve the taste. As patiently as I can, I tell him our water is excellent, and that we've been drinking it for years. "Ah-ha," he says. "Well water, right? It's sure to turn bitter any day now."

My mother is tired. She is much older now than when she first came outside. I tell the salesman he should leave. But he insists on showing us his device. His assistant, a woman who wasn't there before, hands him a cardboard box. He opens the flaps and pulls out an unlikely looking metal contraption that has been packed in chicken feathers. It's made of stainless steel, and looks like a countertop towel holder with too many places for the towels. A few feathers are still clinging to it. I remember a mean rooster we had when I was thirteen. Plymouth Rock.

I had a dream that Obama had sex with Elaine Benes from Seinfeld, and afterward they were lounging post-coitally in the front seats of, was it a Subaru? And the sun was shining on their faces, intense sun, and Obama said, "I haven't got this much sun since I went fishing."

And I was standing outside the car, in front of it, and I thought, "Only a few weeks and he's cheating on us already?"

Woke up this morning from a dream of the desert (maybe late winter desire to escape upstate New York, maybe compensation for having had to cancel next month's projected trip to Djanet, the south-eastern desert oasis in Algeria where friend Habib Tengour is traveling to this weekend, ¿quien sabe?). And dawn-dreaming of vast stretches of sand, of variously shaped sand dunes, though not able to remember the rich Arab vocabulary for their different shapes, I got stuck on the word "dune" — made a verb of it, "to dune," then a noun applicable beyond sand, then all of a sudden the word arose as a name, Mr. Dune, and yes, there is a Mr. Dune I knew, a distinguished Luxembourg poet whom I met only once, some thirty years ago.

The menacing AWP dreams are back. I have them all year long, but they step up as the date approaches. The latest involves sharing a hotel room with my dad, Posh Spice and some other guy. We're doing a panel together. We're very late and I'm not even registered. I use Posh's tiny eyebrow scissors to cut the tags off my underwear.

Dreamovie 79

I am flying somewhere in a plane to drop someone off on an otherwise deserted island.

I am back at home at a university, giving a talk. Afterwards someone points to a signboard (and its removable plastic letters) complaining about some particular thing I've said. I am not sure how the signboard contains my message.

I turn and go into my house. My mother is there, and I'm trying to hide people from her, people that I think she thinks are dead. One of them is a woman. When my mother is out of the house, we sneak the woman up to the third floor, which doesn't look like the third-floor of my house. The space is much larger but also looks more like an attic. We leave the woman up there. She sits alone.

We return to the island, though I don't know who we are besides me. We rescue the man we've stored there, tied up, in the cargo hold of a plane. I can't believe we've left him there tied up, so we untie him quickly and move back home. He may be my brother Rick.

We are in the basement of my house, which is not my house's basement, and we are trying to figure out how to walk up the stairs and through the kitchen, which resembles my grandmother's kitchen, and into the attic without my mother seeing me. We need to sneak the woman we left in the attic back up to the third floor as well.

Somehow we succeed, and I leave the woman there talking with my brother Rick.

My Virginia Woolf-obsessed college professor was in my backyard. Incidentally, her name was actually Mrs. Dalloway. And she was about to die.

But not before cooing some reassurances to me about how beautiful & pleasant & necessary death is.

Then Mrs. Dalloway set to making her final arrangements, which included the Geico gecko who was to be her guide and companion on her journey to the underworld. She went to the gate in the side yard where an invisible gondola was moored. She got in and disintegrated.

Then her scrawny dog ran into my house where I was now located. My mother said it was fitting the dog should die, that it would prove its loyalty to Mrs. Dalloway by doing so. We watched the dog suffer.

Dreamovie 78

It is night, and I am entering, possibly without invitation, a white house that sits behind a high white wall at the corner of a city block. My companion and I are searching for something in the place, but I do not know what. We check the attached garage, we move through a big workroom, and we finally find ourselves in the foyer of this house, which is dominated by large concrete stairs that rise up to what appears to be another front door but this one inside the house. We are at the bottom of the stairs. A man comes out of that door. He has wild white hair that goes out in all directions from his head. The light behind him turns him into a dark and gyrating silhouette. We escape from the house, exiting through the wall, which has now turned into a tall thick hedge, and we escape to street, where we jump onto a motorcycle and drive away, making a left turn around the corner.

I am in Washington, DC, and the day is sunny and almost cloudless. Under a bright blue sky, I move, maybe by boat, maybe on foot, to an island in the Potomac. I do not seem to have any reason for doing that, but after I do the island, and possibly the city itself, comes under attack from various directions. Helicopters spit bullets at us from the sky, boats attack the island and land sending armed soldiers up the gentle slope of the island. Those of us on the island, retreat to a two-storey white building in the middle of it.

I am driving through the countryside, trying to get somewhere, though I do not know where. There is ice on the roads, and the sky is overcast. The entire world is dark. I drive down one road, but a school bus is blocking my way. I drive further and discover that roads everywhere are blocked, which might mean that someone is trying to catch me.

I find myself in a village that resembles an ancient Italian village somewhere at the growing edge of darkness. Someone is conducting a formal school test, but it is not taking place in school, not in classrooms. The testing is taking place outdoors. Maria tells me she gave me a C, which I feel I deserve, but I don't know why. She seems apt to change it, however. She says Tony also received a C, but he has complained about it. It seems that she will not be changing his grade. As we talk about this, we walk up a hill into the night.

I dreamed I drove to look at an apartment downtown. Parking was scarce as always. I found the place, a dingy brownstone. There was a brown metal door with no number on it but I knew it was the place. The apartment I was considering was down a flight of stairs, underground, a basement apartment. The actress from Poltergeist, Zelda Rubinstein, met me at the bottom of the stairs in the room, for that's what it was, one big brown room. There was a huge bed, a fairly decent kitchen. I crawled on the bed and looked out the window. I could see the sky, and half of a high school band (including tuba and symbols) listlessly playing in the street to supposedly give cheer to construction workers demolishing a building on the corner. Zelda gave me a skeleton key and some scraps of wadded up paper, and told me the apartment was for dwarves. I told her I was 5'10" and she said Oh that's ok honey, in her STEP INTO THE LIGHT CAROL ANNE voice. I asked her what the rent was, and she pulled some paper out of her pocket and scribbled some figures, then she said, With the government allowance it's $2 a month. I thought I could save a lot of money paying $2 a month rent, and asked if I could look around. I discovered there were a bunch of apartments all connected to mine like a train, and no doors. I found a bathroom and there was a toilet, a larger than life sink, a weird tub with all kinds of metal tubing and plastic hoses and chairs that lowered down into the water, awful dried orange sponges, hairnets, and folded hospital towels — the accoutrement of the elderly. I realized this was the place in which I was to die. I hightailed it out of there, up the stairs and ran down the street, then ran back and shoved the skeleton key and the wads of folded paper in the door's small rectangular mail slot. Zelda came out as I ran away again, waving merrily, saying, We'll save it for you!

A large meeting room. A sense of opportunity, then fear. Two young women sitting behind a table near the entrance. A man in front of me, fumbling with a small complicated name tag. Folding it. Unfolding it. Sticky backing. No room for names longer than Jones. The women smiled. They didn't mind. They said we were allowed to ruin as many name tags as necessary. I thought, "Why do we need name tags? Why can't we just introduce ourselves?" I put down the tag I was holding and drifted into the crowd. No one was making eye contact because they were all trying to read the name tags. Someone looked at my chest. "I'm up here," I said.

I was walking on a dimly lit, icy city street with my 9 year old daughter. On a slight incline in the sidewalk, I started to slide and couldn't move forward. She grabbed my hand so I wouldn't fall, then helped me walk the rest of the way. I noticed her mittens were deep blue speckled with reds and oranges. The dream gave me a feeling of intense contentment that made me think everything in my life is going to be okay.

Dreamovie 77

I am at a conference in a large hotel, but the attendees are housed not in the usual hotel rooms but in more of a dormitory-like situation. On the walk to my room, I pass through a lobby area on a guest floor. Some of the conference goers have congregated here preparing to sleeping here on large chairs. I continue, now down a narrow hallway, which is lined on both sides with doors right beside each other. Apparently, these doors do not lead into guest rooms. At the end of the hallway, the space opens up (doorlessly) into what appears to be a large communal dormitory room. My space is with the men, to the left, and against a range of large windows. To the immediate right is a covey of young women. I never look at the rest of the room, which is huge, to see if anyone else is staying in that room. After I put down my luggage, I run back down the hallway, pushing myself off both walls of the hallways at once. Eventually, I build up enough speed that I can glide down the down the hallway and into the lobby space. I land right before the large wide stairs leading downstairs. I turn around and run back down the hallway in the other direction. I glide to my bed and put something down on my nightstand. The young women who will be sleeping on the other side of the nightstand ask me something about my gliding. I race again down the hallway and glide even more, circling the room. I race back to my room, gliding out the open windows. Now, I realize that I must keep my arms out in front of me in order to maintain my glide, to keep from falling, and I glide towards the ground, never landing.

I have to call June, and she starts telling me about her day, including the music she's listening to. She begins to say a few things that are a little embarrassing just as I realize my phone is on speakerphone, but the control for turning it off is not on my phone. I can hear her voice coming out of a recliner in the room I'm in. It takes a bit of searching for me to discover that the toggle switch to turn off the speaker is in the side of a cushion on the chair. As I have been talking to her on the phone, I realize that she is talking to me from the very next room, which is divided from the room I'm in by nothing more that an open space in the wall, one that is about three times the width of another door. After I take the phone off speakerphone, I continue to talk to June on the phone, wandering in the room I'm in and waiting for Nancy to arrive.

For some unknown reason, I am handling large sheets of thick white paper. The sheets are about four feet high and three wide, and they are a kind of watercolor paper. I am struggling with the pages at the side of the road, trying to decide what to do with them. Eventually, I decide to leave them on the grass between the sidewalk and the street so that they can go out with the trash. But after I look at them on the ground, I decide that I can find something to do with them, so I pick them back up again. As I do, I realize that a couple of the sheets are cut into the shapes of capital A's, so I decide that I don't need them and I put those back down. As I look at them on the ground, I remember that I like having objects in the shapes of letters, so I move to pick up those diecut sheets. As I move back towards the sheets, it begins to rain. As I reach for them, I see they are now becoming soaked and turning brown from the muddy water underneath them. As I pick up the sheets, the rain picks up, so I drop the sheets, crossing the street with my uncut sheets in my hand.

I head towards the building that I have come from, which is large and possibly a hotel or a hospital. I go to the basement in the building, which is the basement to my house, though it resembles that basement only slightly. My plan is to store my large sheets of paper there. A couple of men appear. One of them, the older one, is looking for a place to store something perishable. As I stand beside my doorless refrigerator, I tell him that my refrigerator will work. He looks at me incredulously, so I tell him that all I have to do is put a door on the refrigerator. He still looks at me incredulously, so I point to the refrigerator door that rests between the wall and another refrigerator that I haven't noticed before even though it is right behind the two men.

A race is taking place. Hundreds of people are running in packs between maypoles, which are placed at the crests of small hills. The runners swarm from place to place, sometimes going back and forth between two maypoles like cricketers running between wickets. Among the runners is a little blonde girl, who is trying to win the race. She makes it first to the top of a hill where I'm standing, and she thinks she will win the race. But she is only a few feet tall. Those of us standing at the top of the hill discuss how she cannot win because no matter how hard she runs, her legs will always be much shorter than everyone else's. The girl keeps running, this time away.

A few nights ago, I dreamed that Mark and I were at the Embarcadero in San Francisco to meet Nicholas Manning (someone I only know, to the extent that I know him at all, through blogland). The Embarcadero was more like a souk--a lot like Fez, actually. While we were wandering around, I saw someone that looked French. This was my dream logic, because I can't actually describe what Nicholas looked like in my dream. He only vaguely looked like his blog picture, but when I saw him in the dream, I knew that he looked French and I walked up to him, touched him on the shoulder in a very formal way, and said "you are Nicholas Manning." He had a friend with him who had glasses but other than that was completely inconsequential to the dream.

After this greeting, the four of us walked outside to the deck of the market, but instead of San Francisco bay was a beach that looked more like the Carlsbad State beach. The light, sand, and water were a kind of rich golden color--a dreamy sort of late-afternoon pre-sunset color. Nicholas said, with great drama, "Ah, it is the Nile! Let us bathe!" In my dream, I had a moment of Wait, this isn't the Nile. Oh, maybe it is. Why not? I was reluctant to swim but then eventually did.

After that, we went back into the market/souk, and Nicholas began talking about rabbits and cats. He said something like "there is no animal better matched to the cat than the bunny. They are equals in every way, especially strength and ferocity." In response to this observation, I pulled out a series of wallet-sized, color holographic images of all the animals I've ever known--pets, friends pets, animals I've seen and remembered, etc. I put these pictures out on a card table in a way that suggested I was telling someone's fortune. We all examined the pictures.

I noticed that there was a bird sitting at the end of the table. The bird was Lester and also a tiger-colored tomcat I used to know named Benjamin. I noticed that the bird/cat had some pin feathers, so I reached out to scratch his head, and this is how the dream ended.

Dreamovie 76

I am riding in strange automobile vehicle with a woman. The vehicle looks like a huge white stone man, and it walks us from place to place. Instead of a head, the vehicle has a rough stone couch and the woman and I sit upon it. I am on the left and she is on the right. The couch does not remain steady atop the vehicle, and we have no seatbelts to hold us in, so we have to hold onto our respective arms of the couch to keep from plummeting about 200 feet to the ground.

The vehicle walks along the path of a river. On the other riverbank, a train runs around a bend. In the river, an old-fashioned riverboat plows through the water. As we watch this scene, we realize that the train and the riverboat are racing, and that the train is winning and thus proving that modern technology trumps the old.

Our perch atop this vehicle is too precarious to continue, so I suggest we stop and dismount. The woman with me doesn't want to stop, but we end up telling the vehicle to walk us to a low classic California ranch. We climb down the vehicle and walk into the house.

Sidney's Absence in Chuck's Presence:

Here I am in a sterile hotel conference room in Chicago, before an assembly of dark grey suits and tight-looking women in black pumps and pantyhose. I'm dressed resplendently, though inappropriately, I suddenly realize, in a floor-length Mongolian deel made of emerald green silk. I'm here to give a marketing presentation on the new book by Sidney Goldfarb that we just published at Station Hill.

My only anchor in this odd, uncomfortable context is Chuck Stein, planted meditatively on a chair to my right, looking for all the world like a Bodhisattva.

I begin to speak.

"Here," I say, "is the book." I hold up a copy of Rushes of Tulsa, feeling comforted by the placid cow and hovering chair against the open blue sky on the cover. Immediately a woman sitting front and center interjects in a peevish tone, "well how do we know the author really exists?"

"Of course he exists!" I reply emphatically. "Here's the book. He's the one who wrote it."

"Then why isn't he here?" someone else calls out.

"He is," I say defensively, "I just stopped by his room on the way down."

With this last statement I stop in my tracks, suddenly realizing that I didn't actually see Sidney in his room, only that he had been staying there. I look over at Chuck pleadingly, hoping he'll back me up. Chuck sits there silently beaming a beatific smile.

Then a sudden thought occurs: while in Sidney's room, I had taken a pair of pants he had obviously just been wearing. The pants are magically in my hands now, still warm and suffused with Sidney's presence, as if he had just that moment stepped out of them. Now I'm no longer dressed in my deel, but in a supple bodysuit reminiscent of a scuba suit. I hold up the pants to show the skeptical audience. Looking at the pants - made of hideous tan & blue plaid cloth - I think, "my god! I can't imagine that Sidney would actually wear such a thing!"

I now step into the pants and pull them up over my bodysuit. They're gargantuan on my small frame, so I gather the surplus fabric around my waist and cinch it tight with the belt, which is fortunately still there, laced through the belt loops. The pant legs fall in a baggy cascade down my legs and pool up at the hems. But the garment is now fastened securely around my waist, and I begin to laugh and dance gaily as if this were a street carnaval in Brazil rather than a marketing presentation in a stuffy hotel in Chicago. Chuck sits silently beaming. I awaken here with a giggle.

Two dreams last night:

I'm on a building roof in a city. A man and I are getting rid of a bunch of dead bodies that were accumulating over the year. We hook some of the corpses to a zip cord and push them off. Some of the corpses are already liquified. These we pours down the side of the building. We might be splashing people. Folks below are screaming.

* * *

I'm planning on attending a leg waxing convention for a free waxing. The best leg waxers will be there. This is good because both of my legs are dry and scaly, in fact, one turned black.

The summer camp was desolate.
A windy field.
The visitors chattering
with clumps of bright balloons.
Though I’d begun to discover how to elevate,
their mindless blather and heedless gaiety
brought me to a boil,
and I tried to pop the balloons
with an angry pinch.

The way to get out of the doldrums was this:
scan the colors of the field for a patch
with a certain living brightness
and fix on it;
then find the edge of a cliff
at the top of a hill,
and when the brightness fills the space
beyond the edge,
trust to leap
into the grand abyss
and fly beyond
the common world.

Cliff after cliff
abyss beyond abyss
opened over
a desolate terrain—
no life had ever assumed
habitat
within its colored gravels and sullen pools—
Oh yes, there was water—some water—mostly dried up now
and the magic, desert-like geography
proved to be a space
on the outskirts of Barrytown.

If my flying failed and I found myself grounded,
again and again I climbed the gravel cliffs
with hoof and claw—
declivitous, almost vertical—
and at the top
against the certain shining of the space above it
flew again.

This time, I don’t think I’ll make it, so I spy
a pool below
of a yellow “calcite” liquid
and allow myself another stratagem –to fall
through
the calcinated water
into my body below
and seamlessly wake then.

Segmented Dream

a man talking about a woman who

has received so much praise she

can't get over herself--

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day.

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May

And--

the dreamer gets confused--

a blackened front lawn being hosed--

some guy who cooks french fries

who's fallen into

excessive pondering of

what solutions french fries could be cooked in--

people, especially poets,

who go over the top

when a subject piques their interest--

Life is but a--

the dreamer wakens.

Last night I dreamed I was in a forest at night, carrying my violin in one hand and holding the hand of a little girl with my other. Hand. We came to the edge of a small lake that was frozen, but beginning to thaw at the edges, the most dangerous kind of frozen lake. I was wearing a short blue dress cinched at the waist. I gripped the little girl’s hand and skated out pulling her along. I skated and looked back and found I had carved a perfect Möbius strip into the ice. On the other side of the lake we approached a long black train with one open window. I lifted the girl into the window, handed her my violin, then hoisted myself in. We walked down the center of the train, and each side was filled with berths where children studied with books and slide rules and black boards, their heads down. Dusty chalk filled the air. The train was ominous, no parents anywhere. Perhaps the children were orphans. They were certainly not happy. I realized that we were in danger. We escaped somehow, and ended up in a crowded market in India.

Rememoried #6

I was visiting Pop-pop on Long Island (he lived far east nearish Montauk) & decided to take a detour & drop by Mark Doty's house (in my dream he just lived out there, though now that I think about it I do know that he lives on Fire Island).

I didn't bring any poetry to read or review in with me, despite having a few manuscripts in my car. I instead asked where a good pizza place was.

Doty had hidden little writings on fortune cookie size papers around his house. I found one under a hat on a kitchen table. It had "1915" written on it in neat black pen.

There was also a farm involved.

Three menacing dreams last night:

Some "fake police" were breaking down the door of my apartment. One of the cops had a machete. I gave Monk (Tony Shalhoub) his gun and an extra ammunition clip. Then I noticed there was a window and fire escape -- we ran out through there. But I didn't take my purse. How was I going to start the car without my keys? How would I survive without identification and money?

In the second dream I was living in an apartment owned by a poetry organization. Turns out a poet who harassed me into a closet with another poet was moving in. I told him if he came near me, I'd call the cops. Hopefully these would be different cops than the ones in the first dream. Either way I was going to have to move.

The last dream involved loan sharks. Chris and I owed a lot of money. The loan sharks stoles our possessions, but agreed to sell them back to us for just a few pennies. They also wanted their $200k. I had no idea how we were going to pay so I suggested to Chris that we pack our stuff and run. I put on my running shoes. Then I saw the hidden cameras and knew that wasn't a possibility.

I'm standing near an enormous leafy tree of some ancient, unknown variety. Suddenly, a branch slowly descends, stopping just before it reaches the pavement. The branch is several feet in diameter and an impressive tree in its own right. It's so heavy, I wonder why it doesn't break. The neighbors' two young children are watching from their window across the street. I decide I should go and tell their father to keep them away from the tree. As I start out in their direction, the branch begins to rise. As it does, it also turns clockwise. By the time I'm across the street, it's fully upright. The father meets me outside. While we stand there talking, the branch comes down again. His wife and kids join us. We all get into the neighbors' van and after traveling a short distance we arrive in an old city. We park near a tall marble building. We get out and start to walk. We pass the tree again, and I tell myself to be sure to remember where it is. Around the corner there's a small restaurant with shiny maple tables and a fireplace. We go in. The neighbors have been there before. They know everyone. The kids' father asks if I can stay, but instead of answering I leave. I think I know where I'm going, but the streets and buildings have changed. I cross one street and turn left at the next corner, expecting to find the tree. I follow the sidewalk up a gentle rise beside an old cathedral. I turn left at the next street. The buildings on the west side cast a deep shadow. As I walk along, I pass some kind of crazy street performer. He's a young man partially enclosed in a wire cage, but his feet and hands are free. A few feet beyond, the street narrows and becomes an alley full of trash and tipped over garbage cans. Just before I wake up, or just after, I see the tree again. I'm glad, but I still don't know where I am.

Dreamovie 75

On an interior hill that sits within an office building, people are rolling down its grassy side and playing. I am one of those people. Afterwards, I realize that I have created a yellow-green stain near the buttons in the middle of my shirt. I realize that my tie will cover it up, so I do not worry about it. But as I replace my tie over the stain, I see that the stain appears in the same spot on my tie, that I have stained both places at the same time.

I am now at the top of the hill, in a wooden telephone booth such as used to be found inside public buildings. I am changing my clothes, changing into jeans and a T-shirt, since my work clothes are dirty. Chris W enters the building through the center of a range of doors at the top of the hill, and she prepares to address us, those people who work for her. As soon as I see Chris, I finish changing my clothes and I exit the telephone booth.

As Chris speaks, a man shorter than she and dressed in a suit stands behind her, holding his hands together in front of himself just above his crotch. As Chris talks, he takes over, contradicting her slightly. I do not know what they say. Either I pay attention only to the deeper meaning of their actions or I cannot understand them. It is clear that this other man is acting as if he is Chris' boss, yet I have no idea who he is.

After the meeting, I try to track down this man's office to figure out who he is. I wander down the cramped and twisting corridors of an old office space, moving quickly. I glance at the nameplates on the doors as I rush past each. I find his name on a door and discover that he is the deputy director of something I've never heard of, so he seems to be Chris' new supervisor.

At the end of my run through this tangle of hallways, I find myself in an open space, a large office, appointed in brown, with a lone secretary sitting at a large desk. I decide to wait there for this man.

The secretary has, apparently, washed the clothes I had stained. She hands them, folded in a neat pile, to me, so I take them from her and walk a few steps into the one-seater restroom to change. The room is quite cramped, especially for someone changing into clothes, but I manage to change into my work clothes. I then open the door.

I do not know who this woman is or why she has cleaned my clothes, but when I open the door, she hugs and kisses me. She is slightly older than me and attracted to me but I do not know why she is, and the situation befuddles me. As she lets go of me, the man I am waiting for appears.

I am in my room being intimate. Outside the door latched three times, "in Harlem," stands the Predator. The Predator has this way of knocking that I hate. It's just really annoying. She doesn't seem to have had lessons in manners behind door knocking. So I'm not going to let him in. He and she can have at it together, with their mixed symbolism: Aztec ceremonial grotesqueries mixed with Western Gothic buttresses all in a homo-derivative form. Now one such arm is knocking on my door. That the spear is a concept behind predatorily hunting shouldn't be surprising. The Predator fits woven in the mesh between civilization (war) and barbarism (individual gratification through violence) in a structure where food is "got," not purveyed, and now he's hers, ready to invade my harmonious sandwich. The chutneys of the Predator's eyes, his and her custom made spirit gaze, the three-pronged red beams scan through entangled home stereo setups and shoe caddies. In the end, happy that you're the Predator and not Arnold because that would be awkward to be human with Arnold, this was a productive dream with great progress toward reconciliation.

GLOBAL WARMING: THE FIRST NIGHT

our new heat coil snaked
gutters melting ice damns,
I push a polar bear in Homicide's
rooftop swing where Robin
Williams, cast as a wimp widower,
once sat mourning his defiant wife
who, chin jut out, refused to give
the gunman her gold locket.

The cub is part of our family now.

Thank god her growth is stunted
for good. (At two she had language,
by three she'd lost her human tongue.)
The cub likes to cuddle. We nuzzle.
Still, I must approach from behind,
take her in a half-nelson. I mime
my friend with her autistic triplets.
Of course, we had our bear spayed.

Dreamovie 74

I am at work, but it is outdoors in a forest glade. Instead of an office with a desk there is a bed, and we work around the bed. No-one even sits on the bed, but we place papers on it. We treat it as a table and we have a meeting while standing or kneeling around it. I am talking to Judy, Julie and Emily about a project concerning the educational uses of government records. I have given them a packet that outlines an exercise to use with teachers to teach them how to use records in the classroom. They don't understand the details of my exercise. They tell me that if they make one assumption versus another that the exercise could go in very different directions. I agree with them, explaining that the teachers must invent the details, that that is part of the exercise.

We are now back at the office and I am setting up a whiteboard in the hallway in front of the elevators. I am setting the whiteboard up in that spot to test a display that we will also assemble in the underground concourse of the Empire State Plaza. As I set up the whiteboard, I worry that people will complain because they cannot get around it. But I assume they can walk around to get to anyplace they need to on the floor. Our floor is a square with hallways along each of its four sides and one down the middle—and my display is blocking only the hallway in the middle. I continue to set up the display. The board is totally blank, so it seems pointless as a display, but then I add a holder to the board. This device attaches the whiteboard via suction and has holes through which to place and secure pens, but I use it to store toothbrushes. As I pull the toothbrushes, all of which my family is still using, in the holder, I hope that no-one steals any of them.

I am in a helicopter that lands on a building.

I am making a phone call from a car. A woman answers the phone, and I say, "Kirsten?" But the woman on the other end is not New York's new US senator Kirsten, so I wait while that woman looks for her. I have no idea why I have just tried to call a woman by her first name even though I don't know her, and I can no longer recall what I'm supposed to ask her about. I try visualize the sheet of paper with my notes so that I will know what to ask her when she answers the phone. She picks up the phone and says, "Hello."

Frank’s father was dead but he was conscious. His mostly decomposed body looked like a cross between a cage and a buoy. Even though he had no arms, he was somehow managing to flail two knives around, then started to chop something. He seemed to find a great deal of violent glee in using these very sharp knives.

We were in a church-like attic. Some woman who I don't know was there. And then Frank’s mother was there, talking to Frank’s father’s corpse, as if he were a child, and asking him, trying to convince him, really, that it would be much better if he were outside, rather than in this attic, that he could have sunshine and air and watch the waves (it was near the ocean). I of course worried that the tide would come up and sweep what remained of his body away.

The dream went white and black then. It looked and felt as if we were in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Everything was visually very disturbing.

A short dark-haired woman who owned the building entered the attic. She was fiddling with something on a shelf and a huge bunch of boxes came tumbling down, crushing her, nearly burying her. We were stunned. We knew she was dead.

Then the dead woman's eyes opened up and her face, which was all we could see of her, turned toward us and she said in a raspy & very scary voice, “Did you feed him chicken tonight?” She was referring to Frank’s dad’s corpse. I said “no,” and waited for her to explain her question. She said, “well, that’s all it takes to set him off sometimes.” She was telling us that Frank’s father’s corpse would fly into rages and we knew then that he was going to try to kill us. He was going to attack us with the knives he had been using. Even though I thought that being killed would at least put my fear and anxiety to rest, I did not want to die.

Dreamovie 73

I am on a dock that extends out from a beach. Its far end is sinking into the water. As I walk out onto the dock, a woman whom I only marginally know hands me a printed flyer. It is a long piece of white paper with a haiku written on the bottom of it, and it carries the additional message "There's no second time for your first love." The idea behind the flyer is that we fall in love only once for the first time so we should hold onto that love. The woman thinks this has something to do with the two of us. I consider how to respond and decide that I won't respond directly by telling her I don't know her. Instead, I decide I'll note to her that even a person first in love isn't necessarily in love with a person first in love with him or her—that we weren't each other's first loves. As I consider what to say, I walk out to the end of the dock, where my feet are in the water. The woman's boyfriend comes to me to argue that I should stay away from her, so I tell him how I plan to extract myself from that situation.

Afterwards, I wade a little bit away from the dock, into deeper water where a wharf turns to make a right angle. I stand there inside that corner with the water above my waist so that I can present a little workshop. Though it doesn't become clear what the subject of the workshop is, the event is being run by Dan W and Jennifer H-K, so I assume it has something to do with poetry. Michael is at the workshop, though I don't know if he's one of the attendees or helping present the workshop. As I start, I am interrupted by a woman who explains that she has bought genealogy software to make the charts. Our topic is not genealogy, but apparently we have some need to create charts for our work. I explain to her that genealogy software can make charts, but only of a narrow kind. I then explain how such software can so a number of things, including store data on individuals and copies of documents related to those people.

I am driving down a city street. I see a group of kids standing around near a blocky building that is supposedly where I'm going. Inside that building, I find a number of people, including Ray and Dianne, planning a conference of local government records managers. It is not clear if our meeting is associated with the workshop I was just working on or with the spring conference of this organization.

I leave the city that I'm in and take a rocket into space with three other people. We are in a 1960s space capsule, and we are already in space circling the globe. There are three people outside the capsule and can't return because opening the hatch will release all the air from the capsule. Two of the people outside are somehow making their way safely back to earth. One woman remains by the capsule. She and I talk to each other while we look at each other through the porthole. She insists that she cannot return to earth and that she cannot reenter the capsule, so I ask her how to get the capsule back to earth. I don't know what she tells me to do, if anything, or what happens to her.

Somehow I return to earth and am walking the streets of a small city in the direction of the same blocky building I visited earlier. I am recently back on the planet and I'm famous for my adventure. People have begun to write accounts of these experiences of mine. As I walk wherever I'm going, I plan in my head how to write this story myself. When I turn down one street, I either see people I know or people who know of me everywhere.

A woman and I are driving in a van out of the city, and I pass a billboard, though I don't know what the billboard says. Soon, we are driving down the road at the edge of the countryside, and there is a cemetery on the road just before our turn. I turn into that cemetery and we apparently visit it. Soon we return to the road and turn right at the very next road and then immediately left into the parking lot of the building. We have a meeting there to plan the conference. At the end of the meeting, each of us receives a pen and pencil eraser, at the cost of 60¢ apiece. The organization, apparently, pays for these believing it is buying these on the cheap. The erasers are in a warehouse and we receive them one by one through a service window. A man inside the warehouse works on this project with a man who is our leader. As this process continues, I work out something (the costs of something? a poem?) on a whiteboard just to the right of the service window.

Later, the woman and I are driving back to this same spot. Just at the cemetery, while we're waiting in line, a brunette woman we know approaches the van and asks for a ride, but she doesn't open the door quickly so I open the front door. My companion asks me if I'm inviting her into the front seat with her. I explain that I'm just trying to talk to the woman to tell her to get in the car. Once she gets in, we drive back to the building with the warehouse. There we continue to work on the conference planning, but it's only the three of us now. The brunette says that the only topic she can speak on at the conference is exercising. I note that there had been a session a few years earlier about how good health was important to good records management, so I suggest she continue to work on that idea.

I am in a building, not sure which, with someone who has not received an eraser, so I promise to help the person get one. We drive to the blocky building in the city, where I explain to the man in the warehouse that we still had erasers to pick up for people in the organization. I try to explain my authority to pick up the erasers by mentioning the man he has worked with previously, but I have to explain that I've forgotten his name even though—I say this, but I'm exaggerating—"he's my best friend." The man not only gives me the erasers for this one person, he also offers me all of the other erasers we'll need. At first I don't want to take them, but I realize that we can distribute them easily enough at meetings.

GLOBAL WARMING: 4 BELOW @ 4 AM


I sprout hemlock needles sans twigs
in the convenient crooks
between my arms and torso.
Dainty, irregular, with pubescent underbellies
I love their invisible stomata,
so I shake my branches for an updraft.
The needles seem to enjoy moonlight
but remain quite attached to me.
I begin to shave them off.

This is in Wyoming. It is winter.
Someone has sunk the cattle's water trough,
tapped an underground geyser. Your kids
are in this hot tub. Their first time.
Their friends out testing the ice on the pond.
I have no idea who you are.
Where you are is yonder. No need to say so.
We're all destined for a dip.

While driving somewhere, I see a new freeway off-ramp under construction. It descends from a wooden overpass partly obscured by clouds, is impossibly steep, and has no visible means of suspension. The pavement stops about a hundred feet above the ground. In an almost vertical position, two or three pieces of heavy equipment defy gravity while the workers take a coffee break. I pull off the road. Near an old industrial building, I see an adult version of a boy I knew in grade school. He seems down on his luck. I say his name, "Ernesto." The two of us walk around a corner. Ernesto tells me he needs a job. We come to a blue door. I point at it and say, "Have you asked at the mailroom?" He says no, and walks off alone.

Dreamovie 72




I am in a small conference room in a hotel. A number of people are seated around a rectangular table conducting some kind of business. After a while, I start cleaning up the room, picking up the bottle caps that the others have spilled onto the floor. Then I try to find a space at the table where I can write without someone watching what I'm writing.



I am wearing sunglasses, but I can still see that there are too many lights on in the room, especially since sunlight in pouring into the room from a far wall that is a solid expanse of windows. As I start turning off the lights, Karri tells me that some of these lights are Finnish warning and security lights that I must leave on. So I do not turn off the blinking red lights embedded into the walls or the single blinking red light that rests at the end of a pole that is sticking perpendicularly out of a wall.



After the meeting, I leave with Karen, and we seem to be on the run from something. We are driving down a small retail street in a city. People are trying to cross the street in front of us. One woman starts to cross the street as we are passing her. After us, she is in the middle of the road, but a large truck does not stop to let her complete her crossing.



We stop a little later at a corner. There is a streetlight at that corner right beside a high chain-link fence that blocks access to a large lake. We talk about pizza. We talk about two people we were with who had been talking about buying four pizzas, but we wonder if they meant "four pieces." There is a pizza parlor across the street, and we are apparently thinking of having dinner.



We continue driving. It is not clear where we are or what we are running from, but we still appear to be running from something. As we drive, Karen says we don't have enough money, but I explain what money I have available, which should be sufficient for us, a couple thousand here, a thousand there.



We are in the hallway of a hotel after checking in. We have a couple of rolling suitcases and a number of loose items. We stop in front of the door to our room and leave our bags there.



We walk to a small room set up with coffee and other drinks. We are probably getting drinks, and there are four men talking in a smaller room off this room. Karen goes with her coffee into that room and starts talking animatedly to them. She seems happy and is quite gregarious. The men become interested in her and turn their heads to look at me, wondering if I'm with her. She keeps talking, using the word "fucking" in some context that I don't catch.



Deciding I have to leave, I exit the room. First, I start to move our stuff into our room, starting with the suitcases. I want to leave before Karen returns, so I'm trying to be quick. But we have loose bags of clothes, a handful of clothes hangers, and other stuff. I put everything away in the room, but not completely. I don't unpack the bags.



Back out in the hallway, I confirm that I've moved everything of ours into the room. I see an armoire in the hallway and just visible on the top of it is the end of a brown belt that looks like it might be mine. I try to pull it off the armoire, but it is stuck behind the armoire, so I have to tug at it a bit. As I do, two cleaning people, one a man and one a woman, watch me. They wonder what I'm doing but don't say anything. Finally, I pull the belt free, and it is an almost yellow beige, definitely not mine.

Dreamovie 71

Nancy and I are trying to avoid certain people, though it is not clear why. We spend the day driving and somehow are able to drive all the way to Minneapolis in the same day.



It seems that I'm going to give a reading there in a place where I've given one before, but the venue we arrive at does not seem familiar. As we stand in that space, a hot air balloon rises out of the floor. I ride atop the balloon for a little while unable to hinder its progress. The balloon reaches the ceiling, where it pauses, stuck. Those of us in the room begin to work on moving the the balloon up and out of the building, through the window.



I'm in the parking lot of the venue, and Jim DiZ drives up and parks. Soon, Siobhan shows up with their boys, and we all go into the space.



The space is supposed to be inside a building, but it seems like the outdoors in parts, with grass growing on the ground. A stage backed by a projection screen sit at the back of the room. We sit down on folding chairs in the audience. Where the floor was flat before, the audience is now seated on tiers.



As I sit there, I realize that I haven't brought anything to read. I decide that my solution will be to read poems off my computer, so I pull out my laptop, but it's not mine. I've picked up Tim's by mistake. I give that one back to Tim, who is suddenly with us, and I start opening my computer to decide what to read.



We are now on the side of the room, rather in the front row of the audience. We are sitting on folding chairs in the grass. As I work on finding poems to read, I realize that I haven't produced the audience booklet I usually produce for each reading I give. I think, briefly, about producing one but realize I do not have the time. I pull a poem up on the screen of my computer and decide that I'm ready, assuming I can pull up others as need be as I'm reading.



I need something from Tim's computer and he has some kind of storage device with comblike attachments. Somehow, the thick almost brushlike combs of this device are where data is stored. I pull off one of the combs expecting to be able to use it, but it's obvious I've just broken that, so I throw it away. Tim is upset with me, but I cannot fix the contraption.



When I go up to read my poems, the arrangement of the room has changed dramatically. The stage faces in a different direction, and now there is a small blocky white table that I can put my computer on. I do not plug the computer into an outlet for power, and I do not attach it to a projector, but somehow it can project through me to the screen behind me, where a visual poem appears. I begin to read my poems aloud.

Last night I dreamed I was cleaning out my lounge room, which was cluttered with rubbish. At the same time I was trying to make lunch for friends. The sink was also cluttered with unwashed dishes and bits of half eaten food. I started to strip off the cushion covers from the couch. The cushions, a blue denim material, were stained, had collected crumbs in the corners and were full of dust. There was a whoosh of mess every time I shook one out much like the character in Peanuts who exudes dust particles and debris everywhere he walks. Pigpen is his name.

I am living in a pigpen and much as I try to clean it up I am overwhelmed by the amount of mess and the sense that I will never get to the end of it. Added to this I am to baby-sit my sister’s two small children, Costa and Bryony. I do not know any children with such names in reality but the Costa in my dream is the older of the two, around two and a half years, and Bryony is just one. Costa in my dream looks like my real grandson, Leo and in the dream his mother who arrives is not my sister, but my daughter and Costa is reluctant to part with his mother.

She takes time to take her leave, all the time reassuring her son that she will be back soon. He cries when she goes at last, but only momentarily. His sister, Bryony, seems not to exist in my dream during the leave taking but she reappears as I am taking Costa for a walk down some valley where I know there are a series of children’s entertainments in place.

Costa is delighted and runs from one stall to the other, whereas Bryony stays close to me. I have to carry her most of the time, she is only just now learning to walk. One stallholder calls us over to see her display of toys, which are mechanised. This does not impress me because I know that Costa will want one and, were I to buy one for him, I am sure he would be disappointed. These are not toys with which to play. These are not toys to handle. These are toys that you can only watch again and again as they go through their routine – nursery rhyme characters such as Bo Peep and Pinocchio, going through their paces.

Costa is enthralled until all the toys’ batteries run dry and they stop. He is annoyed with me because I have suggested we must move on. Somehow in response he falls into a long tub of water at one side of the stallholder’s lot. I am annoyed with the stallholder woman because she has caused Costa to get into a rage and now his clothes are wet through. The woman tells me that there is a second hand clothes shop for children not far off where I can find dry clothes for Costa. We traipse off in the direction of a huge barn like structure, which has a maze of rooms inside, each filled with racks of clothes for children, boys and girls, from infancy through to early adolescence.

Once inside one of the workers tells us that we can choose any clothes we like for free because today is a special day when they are treating children who suffer from cancer. Costa is delighted and runs off to try to find an outfit. Bryony is looking for clothes, too, and I try to help her to select a good outfit that will replace the dirty one she is wearing. I run off for a minute to make contact outside with my sister whom I gather has booked a taxi.

Once outside I see there has been a muddle with the taxis and it takes some time to sort out which taxi we will take to get all of us home. I have not yet found my sister who is due to return at any minute. Then I realise that I have abandoned the two children and I rush back inside to try to find them. It is getting dark and I have trouble getting back inside the building because a security guard has blocked my way. He lets me in when I tell him that I have still two children, my sister’s small children locked inside. I call out their names from one room to the next. I am hysterical now, beside myself with horrible forebodings of what might happen to those two beloved children.

I find Costa first. He has grown weary with all the fun of selecting clothes and he is slumped in a corner. Bryony is not far away from him. She is distressed but pleased to see me and I pick her up and take Costa by the hand to lead them out of the building. We get to the exit and I can see my sister across a moat waiting for us. She is now hysterical herself because somehow she has heard that her children are missing. I did not want her to know this before they were found but at least she can see them now, and she can see they are okay.

We try to cross the moat and must do so by walking through a deep gully that forms a damned section in the middle. We have to wait for passing traffic. Costa gets through okay but Bryony trips and hits her head. Her mother, my sister, stands in the distance and watches her fall. There is nothing she can do. She has to settle for me taking Bryony into my arms to comfort her; both she and Bryony must settle for that. I wake up before mother and daughter are reunited.

Last night I dreamed I met a Vietnamese man. He was holding a child. I had met him before, so we were trying to figure out how and where we met. We began looking at books together. On the shelf, there was P. Lawler's newest book, or books. I wish I could remember the titles. One was a brightly colored book with two halves to it—one half was "essays," the other poetry. Each of those books was divided into sections. The titles for essays and poetry faced each other on the cover, so the poetry title was upside down. I think it had the word dragons in it. The "essays" weren't traditional essays. They were elaborate drawings, some the color of illuminated manuscripts. They were maps with titles of bodies of water and land that created threads of narrative in simultaneity. Some of the lakes had Tolkein-ish names, but overall the multiplicity of the project was breathtaking. And the maps contained a lot of blue. Some of the poetry was diagrammatic but most was spatially seeded across the page, simply in text.

I had a dream once—or, at least, I think I did. I don’t remember my dreams, & this was no exception. So let’s suppose I had a dream which may or may not have occured, may have been remembered, may have just been a synapse activated by another incident, devolved déjà vu.

Let’s assume. Dream. In which I am walking past a row of shops, between rows of shops. Plate-glass windows. In which people piled up—no, faces pushed against the glass, one above the other, layers of them, levels, like a sequence from a Fritz Lang film or a page from a noir comic book. Mosaics of faces. I am walking past them. They remind me of sheep. I make baa-ing noises at them. Swear at them.

Then the scene changes. I am walking along a country road at night. The person I am with turns to me, says “That’s funny. I didn’t know there was anyone behind.” I turn, look; & under a streetlight about a hundred metres distant, is a person just standing there.

No memory of it. Memory of it.

No dream. Date stamp c.1960. Must be. Age, activity. Some University philosophical thinktank, out in the country, over a couple of days. Get bored around midnight, decide to go out & hitchhike north. Anywhere, away from the here. Take someone with me.

We walk. & walk. Main highway. No cars. Nobody. Reach the small country town that’s a couple of miles away. 1 a.m. Wait. No-one around. Decide to. Walk back.

A train goes by on the track that parallels the road. Freight train, lots of wagons, each several levels, all of them filled with sheep, meat train, will be, abattoir-bound. Baa-ing in the night, multifold, louder than the steam engine. I baa back at them, I swear at them. The person with me says “That’s funny. I didn’t know there was anyone behind.” I turn, look; & under a streetlight about a hundred metres distant, is a person just standing there.

No dream. The running. Away. The physical escaping the metaphysical. I do not go back. Do not.

Talk about it. Tell.

Diana (life long friend) and I are in some joint eating, and I have a big bag of stuff to carry out. There are people there who are in the theater or movie business, and I realize at some point that I applied for a job with them years before when I was young...something called "Hot Chicks" ( or something stupidly similar). I never heard back from them. The men we overhear are crude and loud. I have a big bag of stuff to carry, (baggage?) and it is too heavy. Then a guy reminds me that he knows I auditioned for them. I ask Diana if she has moments when things in her memory just disappear. I tell her I think I had a kid. She looks at me funny. I tell I think I gave it to Michele (a friend I no longer talk to) to keep for me, but then I forgot about it.She says No, you gave it to ME. I am shocked. I said where is she? (I seemed to know it was a girl) and she says she gave it to someone named Jo Jackson. A friend of her husband's. Noone I ever heard of. She said Jo was a woman who worked in a drugstore. I asked if Diana had seen the child and she said not often.

We start to leave the place, carrying the bag, going up and down stairs while I am crazed with the thought I have a child out there somewhere who doesn't even know me. The bag gets left somewhere. Diana wants to stop to go to the bathroom. I convince her to wait until we've descended all these stairs. But we wind up in a subway station that is dark and threatening looking. (it's from another dream about me trying to find/get on the right train). Diana has to go and runs into the ladies room and locks the door. I wait aside. And wait and wait. I realize she's not coming out. I am frozen with fear.

I wake up.

##

The Red Car

The daily papers in the back

seat spread atop the old women

come from the sex factory;

their mouths replaced

by labia, the desert beneath

their skirts sewn shut. The

passenger seat is stacked

with old bones, like firewood,

dead children and husbands,

parents and forgotten aunts

gleam like polished ivory

from years of travel. The driver's

foot is on the accelerator.

She leans into the wheel,

eyes squinting in the dimming light;

a tub of toothless smiles,

coy giggles but the car stands

still, waiting, waiting

for the traffic light, three

black moons that hang

above, to change.

went to the inauguration. the train rolls into pioneer square because the ceremony is actually in seattle, not dc.

actually on stage with obama who begins eating a chili dog during his speech because he wants to keep the atmosphere 'chill' with the people. i try to ask people if they thought that was acceptable after the speech, but no one seemed to care.

on my way back, after visiting my sister's college dorm room, got attacked by an elephant that happened to be wandering around a suburban neighborhood. i tried to dodge it, but it wasn't working, so i ran across the street where a white guy was watering his dirt.

i screamed as i approached, & he happened to have a rifle on hand & shot the elephant for me. i hid in his house while the carcass was removed & the street hosed off. his wife was jealous of me.

There is so much more to this dream than I remember. I am at dinner with a group of terrorists during a ceasefire. I sit at a table with the foreigners. Even their plates are set at an angle; differently from the way we set ours. One of the terrorists’ children is playing up and her father threatens her with immolation. I cannot believe he will do it or that others might sit and watch.

Then I am standing in the bathroom of my general practitioner, Judith Heale, offering to help her to fix the crack that has developed in her bathroom wall above the shower line. I offer to get a ladder for her, one of those short ladders that people use in libraries to fetch books that are out of reach. I offer to hold it steady for her. Judith hesitates about using this ladder. She tries to reach from the floor at her normal height. She does not want my help. She looks over at the group of terrorists eating their meal and I can tell that she is critical of them.

Now I am involved in a fight with a woman who has been violent towards herself and others. She will not stop killing people or threatening to get herself killed. She has a gun and will use it indiscriminately on anyone. She is tough. I manage to get the gun from her. I try to empty it of bullets, firing off to the side, but whenever I do, the bullets do not come out properly. They plop out from the barrel like jellybeans from a lolly dispenser.

One of the woman’s enemies comes by and they begin a physical fight. This time she is a goner, I think. Her enemy has a knife. By now there is only one bullet left. I hold it in my hand. The gun and bullet are now separate. Then the woman grabs the gun back from me. She keeps calling over to me to give her the bullet but someone else nearby manages to get the gun from her and he throws it down the stairs.

It is as if the gun were indestructible. An old man and a boy are now preparing to dynamite it. They have retrieved the gun from the foot of the stairs. They have lit a wick and are about to throw away the gun attached to the burning wick before it explodes. I imagine the gun will explode just as the woman is meeting her end. I still hold the bullet in my hand. I want both of them, gun and bullet, to disappear altogether.

The woman continues fighting her opponent, screaming like a banshee. They tussle. Occasionally she gets the upper hand and I think that she might stab him, but then he overcomes her again. Now a group of men, all of them the woman’s enemies, prepare a small fire. The coals are glowing red, and she finally concedes defeat. She lies down at the fire and rests her head on top of the glowing coals. Then she puts her blue coat over her face and rests motionless. I watch and wait for her to dissolve.

I still hold onto the bullet. The wick attached to the gun has fizzled out, but still seems to be smouldering. I wonder will the gun explode as she dies. I cannot bear to watch her. She lifts her head from the flames. She is still alive, but nearly gone. I can feel the bullet in my hand. I wake up and think of the words ‘the heart shaped bullet’, the title of a book by Catherine Flett, about the death of the author’s relationship with a man she once loved.

to my annoyance
not in internal directory
03187-52 up inside jelly keyboard insert fingers
dialling number with or in spite of a zero disconnect
dream works registrar removed bookshelves stole
one needed same for Pennie transgendered Charmian
struggled with crowded corridor to see results board
blurred wrong glasses came ninth

So, following my night with Obama, I had a dream where I got that pixie hair-cut. But it was VERY swiss, meaning it was ultra pixie short, white-blonde on the front and black underneath... don't know why I am having such strange dreams (just accidentally wrote jeans!)

Charles Bernstein is sitting at one end of a subway car, preparing to do a reading to be heard by the four or five other people in the car, one of whom is myself. Bernstein speaks a few words in introduction, and perhaps launches into the beginning of the first poem he'd like to read, when he is interrupted by an altercation between myself and a tall young man sitting somewhat near to me. This man, wearing a spiffy black coat, speaks of the food debris (bread crumbs?) and shards of glass near him on the subway bench, and accuses me of being responsible for this. He says that just because I am not a "popular person", that doesn't justify my making his environment degrading and dangerous--accusing me, thus, of acting out of bitterness. Bernstein, understandably disturbed by the interruption, walks off and finds a place to sit and continue reading two cars down. But his words nevertheless are piped into the car where the four or five of us are each fixed/rooted to our initial positions.

So, last night I kissed Obama 12 times! Oh it wasn't kinky and weird really. it was swiss ad innocent! We kissed on the cheek twice which is common and standard fair in these parts and then of course I insisted he kiss me again and again! He seemed tired and sad.

11-14-09

five dream parts

1

We know bees who
burst forth
from an eviscerated ox dermis
don’t we? We
learned it
in a book
and in a dream
of healing. It isn’t
the ox that gets healed.
It is the mind.

Oh the mind’s ox lies slaughtered
and the blood runs free.

The doctor called me doctor
and spoke in doctor code
about the ailment that she noticed
under the epidermis
of my shoulder.
How gently’d be
my demise.

She wore a white chemise
and I liked her.


2

It was a ruse
and I knew it.
I’d tell her
later
at our as-
signation down
the hill.
This is a dream
I’d say. When I wake
the white bees crawling
’neath the dermis of my shoulder
will not be there. But we never
arrived at the hill and in the dream
I never wakened.


3

Paintings
easily miming
famous archetypes—
this one’s a Cezanne.
The painter
threw it together
with a few apt dabs
catching just the right
posture of the slanting shoulder shapes.

Later we were all walking
credibly
down a hill in the neighborhood.
The doctor would be in.
Perhaps I’d call her.


4

I can’t focus properly
on the fourth part.
We were talking
about old girl friends, old lovers,
and the power
congealed
in their names.

One of them asked me to name them and I
rattled off a few rather casually.


5

Awake,
it’s winter
and the bees
are congealed
in gold clumps,
nowhere to be taunted
from the hive
and no longer fear
the white disease.

Shortly before five this morning, I awoke from a dream that consisted of one distinct, bright image. In the process of remembering the dream, I began searching online for black artists. While sifting through the results and following some of the links, I whispered the dream to myself so I wouldn't forget it. To my disappointment, the dream faded with each repetition. Shortly after five, I opened my eyes. I was still in bed. Our youngest son, home from working a late shift, was still up and listening to music in the kitchen. The dream was gone. And now I wonder if it really was a dream, or if I was dreaming that I was dreaming.

became a crossroads between the living & the dead.

in my waking dream Gerald Mast -- who in life was a great scholar of film -- was a glass artist. I went to his studio & pickd out a wall piece which also was a working clock. I gave it to Regina as a present. Regina -- a child psychologist -- told me it was a clock for children & didn't work at all in her house.

then I had Gerald himself -- along with an assistant (much like the "assistant" he brought on his final overnite visit to my house years ago) -- come to Elyria to install the piece at my parents' home. (when Gerald taught at Oberlin he sometimes came to Elyria to dine at the Paradise). Mother immediately disliked the piece much to Gerald's displeasure. he left & I woke before negotiating the fate of the glass clock.

Juliana Spahr in my dream last night. (known her since college). I wish I could bring back more details. It was stressful and instructional. Or I should say -- she was instructional in some kind of a stressful context.

I am sitting with a woman--I don't recognize her. She is blond with long legs that are touching my legs and maybe even implicated with them. I have just given her some cassettes. I think I am explaining to her that they are damaged and I recall clearly that the tapes seems to have gotten wet, swelled up and cracked the plastic housings. They were dry now but the damage remained and the tape could be seen hanging out and in some cases seemed to have morphed into different textures and in others the strands had doubled or split into several layers. The woman did not seems dismayed by this deterioration. She said she was a secretary and was used to giving and taking orders. Finis.

Edgar Allan Borges

It was some kind of convention but I cannot now recall what it was about. All I remember is the venue, Rotorua, and a group of us around empty wooden tables in a wide open room like a warehouse or a barn. In the shadows, the dark-skinned boys with lustrous eyes, waiting hopefully and expectantly to join our deliberations, were certainly Aboriginal. I wanted to buy a pot of honey and asked therefore where the nearest newsagent was. Lake Road, my friend said, so off I went into the town to look for it. Sometimes when we become lost in dreams we never find our way again but I did at last come to the right street and walked down it past brand new condominiums and office buildings made of steel and glass. The newsagent in the basement of tower there, naturally, did not sell honey but, as I went on across a glittering plaza, a secretive young man walked past me with his eyes fixed reverentially upon a small jar he was holding in both hands before him. A fair way along the road I came upon a cafe. Black and white chequered floor, bare tables, metal chairs, no-one in attendance. On one of the tables, an ornate bank note, of large denomination, in a currency I did not recognise; on another, a pile of small books with soft red covers. It was an honesty system. I paid my money and took away my copy. A strange script, cursive, stained like old blood on brownish paper. There were line drawings too, in black ink, hectic and a bit over done. The stories were by Edgar Allan Poe and two of them—a short one near the front, a long one towards the back—were on Maori subjects. I read them with growing excitement as I walked back up Lake Road. Yes, I heard a woman's voice say, we smuggled them out of America, we don't have copyright clearance, but it seemed important that these stories should be known in the country that inspired them. I was standing in the small porch of a public hall reading when out the door my father came. He looked handsome, relaxed, at ease, glowing with health and vitality. I hugged him. You look wonderful, I said. I feel good, he replied, grinning at me. About the age I am now or maybe a little younger. He and his friend went out into the yard, took off their sports jackets and began setting the bonfire that we would later light. I felt a sudden doubt: Poe? Or Borges? The Dutch owner of the cafe where I bought the book came up. A huge man with a perfectly bald head. Laughing at my brief temptation to steal the currency left upon his table. The Dream of Coleridge, he boomed. You know it? Who is to determine the ownership of dreams? Perhaps, and I know you have already had this thought, we have things precisely the wrong way round. You are not the dreamer but the dream.

I have been sleeping much more soundly lately. I have been having long dreams of strangely personal and direct scenes that feel real when I am in them, which never used to happen to me. For years my dream were totally surreal and insane and made of impossible images. Now the thing I find most often I am doing in my sleep is editing words on a paper. I will be in my sleep working on a sentence by inserting all these other words, and building it out from this tiny thing in long weird graphs that I then repeat inside my head and build, and find building, until I eventually realize I am sleeping. The aggravated and horrendous scenes that usually dominate now more occur in very brief and intense bursts, that kind of punctuate the long, more calm ones. I am told I talk a lot in my sleep. I think I am going to find a way to begin recording myself, or to transcribe the sentences I am working on when I realize I am sleeping, as I often find I am able to continue looking at the sentences while I am still asleep even after I realize I am asleep. I can never remember the sentences directly when I wake up anymore, though I am always left remembering how I said something I had been meaning to say in such a way. I need to figure this out.

I dreamt that my tooth, the smallest tooth in my mouth, very small in comparison to normal sized teeth, was loose. I wiggled it and remembered that this happens often - I often move my tongue over my teeth and feel them budge slightly, generally leading to paranoia. The paranoia always subsides, however, as time progresses and my teeth remain intact. This tooth continued to move though, as if it were on the verge of falling out, and I knew as my molars began falling into my hand that something was not right. I grew increasingly anxious until I remembered that despite my paranoia, my teeth never actually fall out. I concluded that if my molars were in my hands, it meant that I was dreaming. To make sure I was dreaming, I challenged myself to fly - and I did. I flew up above a Hispanic woman who watched me in disbelief and down the block of my old high school. I felt as if I had figured something very important out, yet I couldn't completely believe it myself. I wavered in flight because I still doubted my ability. I finally landed on the corner after having too much trouble remaining in the air. I walked into the first building I saw, an old, tan warehouse surrounded by wired fencing. Inside was bare and cold. Everything was painted this off-white, tannish color that clumped on the walls. There were thick, rectangular, cement columns dividing the floor space. I walked towards a counter in the middle of the warehouse and pointed at a boy around my age that was standing there sheepishly looking through paper work. I headed towards the bathroom which was past a small area behind the counter closed off by caution tape. He followed and closed the door behind him. It was a tiny space. We stood chest to chest. I grabbed his ass and giggled as he turned his head from mine. He was very shy and refused to look at me. I made some witty comment and he kissed my cheek once, smiled blissfully, kissed it again and walked away with an extra bounce to his step. I hadn't gotten what I'd intended, yet I walked out of the bathroom feeling rejuvinated and elated with the knowledge that this boy loved me. I walked passed the counter, found a plastic dress-up crown and put it on my head. I found a tiara for a queen and a plastic sword next to that. I placed the tiara around my waist, held the sword in my hand and flew out of the warehouse. Then my alarm went off.

Upon entering the BART station this morning I remembered part of my strange dream last night. "I" or my perspective was in the station with a group of people waiting on a train when this tiny little ball of a baby--like a bouncy, fleece-covered sausage--was dropped onto the platform. The baby/sausage rolled across the yellow safety strip and onto the tracks. This baby was TINY and didn't seem to have any limbs.

I wake up and something feels amiss.

I walk out to the living room and see through the window of the front door a plush orange and black spotted-is it a bobcat, mountain lion?-arch its torso up to the window and slightly thrust its body forward, showing me itself It must have run away-I think I saw it join and prowl with other cats as I walk up to the front door and open it This is Barrytown-varying levels of dug up ground, messy thick wet dirt crumbling rising and falling into substantial abysses the Barrytown folk, who are very gentile, possibly Victorian, upright torsos, chins in the air, parasols, coattails, walk along the treacherous terrain as if it was a paved city street, without wild cats, without abysses-I shout to the folk from my doorstep in a strained British accent- "Good day my lady!" I see a woman with tri-pronged pearl earrings strolling along-"Wonderful day for a walk isn't it?"

I go back into my house and a youngish cutesy woman is sitting in my living room. Right away I ask her-"Do you time travel?" She giggles and says something to the effect of-"Of course!" I ask her-"How?" She says, "by onomatopoeic potatoes" Then she picks up one of several pieces of white paper I have written words on, and the one she picks up says "Travel together" She smiles, slightly in awe, but knowingly understands the message, and she is happy

Escape
I am climbing up the steps in the stairwell of this rather amazing building. Is it a university? In one floor, there are broken blue bike frames embedded in the wall, in another, glass bottles. The floor is grey cement. The walls are rendered white. Everything is angular yet peaceful.


Another dream. Somehow, I know I have travelled forward a little in time. There is a girl wearing a red polo top and she and I are outside this office with glass walls all broken, blood droplets everywhere, like something has rampaged through. Then I am in the present. I am trying not to get caught by whatever-it-is. After moving around, I see the girl in red. I know we'll soon be safe. As soon as we're both outside, I have to be somewhere again, over there beyond those trees. I spot this massive-looking motorbike with fat, wide tyres [which I now recognise, after describing the dream to a friend, is similar to Batman's futuristic/awesome motorcycle]. I think Good, I'll get there quicker. But the bike is so slow. So slow. Slow enough that I actually have to let a car pass me. I feel frustrated and irritated.

And then I wake up.


The second dream is such an interesting variant of my usual getting-chased dream [which I have interpreted to be my deadlines-as-monsters]. I actually get to escape on a vehicle. Usually, I am trying to escape on foot. Maybe I'm thinking smarter?

In my dream i was writing poems where every line was followed by some phonetic remains of the former as a process of decay.
example

    the opposite bends
            opps   ends

I'm someplace that's part-way to hell -- a level before. It's a wasteland. I'm H.D. I came here voluntarily to help my once friend, Ezra Pound, do research. But things have changed. I want to leave but he controls this realm. I get his revolver and try to shoot him. The bullet heads straight for his chest, but an invisible force changes the bullet's path and it ricochets, almost hitting me. It's terrifying to know that he's invincible and so evil. We discuss the situation and I am resigned that I can't take him down. I make a comment that where we're at now is parallel to being in purgatory waiting to get into heaven. He's not amused by my observation.

I go back to my dorm room that I share with my boyfriend (who is also unhappy being in this part-way to hell realm). I tell him that we have to figure out a way to escape. Then a little girl comes in, it's Ezra's daughter. She and some other folks have just arrived in the realm to do research. She tells me that her father decided we can leave and go back into world. I know there's a catch, that we're only being sent back because it's time to play our roles in his plan -- which involves involuntary visions and prophecies. We have 30 minutes to pack everything, which we do hastily. I take a variety of rocks, including a bright red one. There are five stones that Chris says go together, but I'm not concerned about keeping them together. I'm in a rush to leave.

I'm back at home in my office. There's a bunch of books and texts -- some of which I don't want to put back in my library because they're Ezra's and so disturbingly twisted -- although I do want to keep the mystical stuff.

DREAM ON NEW YEAR'S DAY

woke to a dream in which I was at a party with Sophia Loren. as she was abt to leave she came over to give me a pink carnation. I quite despise carnations but I knew in the dream that I'd be taking it home to press because it was from her.

Beginning at the corner of Liberty and Court Streets in Salem, Oregon, in front of the old Reed Opera House, I run west down Court Street alongside a powerful white bull with long, wickedly curved horns. There are no people and no cars. The further we run, the more hostile the bull becomes; each time he tries to gore me, I ward him off by pushing my right hand against his neck. Soon, without stopping at a red light, we follow the left turn lane onto Commercial Street. About halfway to State Street, the bull suddenly breaks ahead, stops, and turns around to face me. He lowers his head and is ready to charge, but before he does I push with all of my strength against the space between his horns. He pushes back, but soon gives up and walks away. I run the rest of the way around the block alone. Then I look up at the third-story windows of the Reed Opera House and the bricks in between, and am amazed that they are exactly like the real thing.

In my dream I am aware that the real estate market has problems, but I can’t discern who is worse off, buyers or sellers. We are in the market for a house and so we are walking a neighborhood looking for the perfect backyard. We need someplace that is flat because it will be our retirement home. Our search moves back and forth between walking and studying an aerial view. Since the aerial view is in black and white and on paper, I use pinpricks to designate the property boundary lines. I also distinguish some lots by making pinprick textures and patterns, inserting the pin from the back of the paper. Each lot gets a different pattern that shows up in tiny white dots. Finally we see a house that has almost no front yard because the driveway slants off to the right between two houses.

After that I’m in a dentist’s office to get a tooth pulled. The office is furnished like a bedroom and the dentist, an Asian man, will operate on me while I’m in bed. He prepares himself by kneeling on the bed. He holds a pair of pliers in one hand and a syringe in the other. He is wearing a grey suit. The nurse is concerned that the instruments are not sterile, so she keeps splashing liquid on them. The nurse and dentist talk about needing to go down an inch to and inch and a half to extract the molar.