The Great God Pan is (not) Dead

Last night I dreamed I was turning into a goat. It was quite interesting, watching my arm grow a pelt of thick whitish hair, my fingers claw into a cloven hoof. I wasn't perturbed because I knew (in the dream) that this had happened before. The woman next to me, who in some respects resembled my dead sister (our birthdays are in January, a week apart), and who I thought perhaps was ill, admitted she too was undergoing the same metamorphosis ... we fell upon each other with a lust that was, well, goatish. Until my son, who was on the bed with us, asked us to stop because we were interrupting his TV watching. The bedroom was in an annex of the vast terminal of an airport. I went out into the concourse, I had no visa for onward travel ... and where, anyway, does a goat keep his passport? Then I was in a bathroom, hearing my name called in tannoy-speak ... I woke up. All day I have been looking, at odd moments, speculatively, at my right arm. As if awaiting the resumption of that impossible transformation ...

[dream etymologies, 1]



family.

        I dream that 'family' is as if from the Latin verb, fo, fare, ‘to speak.’

Then family means

                                the people who talk to each other.

Our word 'fate' comes from that verb too -- fatum, 'what has been spoken.'


So familiar things are:

        the things that speak for us.

        And sometimes to us.



[dream etymologies, 2]


In dream I learn that the phrase

                        vain scrutiny

is a technical term, and means a secret meeting or covert illegal assembly. At first I think this must be a mistake or mistranslation in the book I’m reading (I’m often reading a book in a dream).



But then in the dream I go to the dictionary, which gives that as the proper meaning indeed of the phrase, evidently a calque or translation from a Slavic expression – I see the Russian phrase in Cyrillic.



In the story I had been reading when the phase cropped up, the illicit meeting had been infiltrated by police provocateurs.

Gordon Ramsay was murdered by a serial killer a few nights ago, in my dream. I found him and his livers, which were everywhere.

I'm in a class. Outside a large clearing. The mountains open into a crystal: violet, purple, red display of lights. Many poets are gathered around. I have my mother's old camera. I run to meet the light, a large field, glass. I snap the photo. But the photo can't depict what I'm seeing. Then the mountain is a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I look again, and it's all one big building, and a playground. What happened to the crystal light? Where is it? The mountain, where is it? Juliana Spahr says, "there -- that building, that's where it came from." I don't understand.

I had a dream that I was supposed to call Bernadette (Mayer). I have been hanging out outside with some people and I've totally forgot to call. There's a phone booth. I have some change but it keeps falling out of my hand. When I finally drop in the coins a whole lot of change starts falling out of the phone. I stuff some quarters in my pocket- one is a large silver coin and there's another one that is even too big for my pocket. I am trying to remember what we are supposed to do but I can't and I also can't remember her number. I go to a restaurant and stay there a really long time with some people. Alan Davies comes in and says, "Hi, Nick" as if he sees me there all the time. I guess I've gone out for a minute and come back to a table with some people sitting there. In a joking way, not knowing the people, before sitting down I quote the Ashbery line from "The Tennis Court Oath":"How much longer will I be able to inhabit this divine sepulcher?" but the person sitting across from me, a woman, doesn't seem to recognize the line or get the joke and I think: maybe she is too young to get the reference.

I'm in a field planting crystal sculptures. Kimberly Lyons is in charge and says, "You'll have to take these out and title them." On a ledge, next to me, a cat is licking my face. A ship is somehow involved in all this.

There were various dioramic scenes with animals. First, there were these “funnel-web rabbits”, white rabbits that lived in conical holes like funnel web spiders. Then I was petting some cheetah kittens that barked like hyenas. Then there these supposed ostriches that coiled into a ball and rolled and unraveled, thing is though when they unraveled they were really storks. This was all in an artist compound of some sort. I had collected a lot of artwork together into a magazine (chapbook style) and wanted to change the name of Sleepingfish to “Grupo Jul” or “Charro Jul” and thought it was a brilliant name at the time. I don’t know what Jul means.

I dreamed that two men were chasing me and I didn't know what they wanted, but it wasn't good, and a nice woman in a white car picked me up, and the two men got into their own (red) car and followed us. And I called the cops, but they wouldn't come because I didn't know the zip code of our location. And we were nearly out of gas, but the gas never ran out. And I called my dad and told him to get the Mtn. Brook cops gathered around the station there, and we drove toward the station.

I dreamed that I had a son who was born 6 weeks early. I didn't even know I was pregnant. It was an easy delivery and he was very small, but healthy. I frequently dream of having daughters but never of having sons. I named him many things. I named him Fredbert, which is the name John gave to a sea lion at B&N. I named him Edward, which is my dad's name, and called him Ted. I named him John James. I named him Jesse James. I named him Jesse Jackson. I tried to figure out where he'd come from and whose family I was supposed to be naming him after. The in-laws (who were two completely irrelevant people) came to see him and wouldn't give him back. I wanted to get him back and run away with him and figure everything out by myself.

Saturday was my nephew's ninth birthday, and that night I dreamed about the party we'd attended for him that afternoon. The dream, however, featured two guests who hadn't attended the actual party: Marcel Proust and Eloise. The two of them seemed--not, I think, inaptly--to be great friends, spending the whole party sitting next to each other, sipping from the tiny teacups of a child's tea set and quietly sharing private jokes that caused them to break out in skeins of shared giggles. I'm sure you can imagine the smile I wore on waking.

Frank wasn’t dead but had been away for a long time. So happy to see him, to talk.

Up in the hills somewhere, maybe Vermont. Snowy hills and curvy windy roads. Frank was driving; Jake and I riding in the car. The car was getting stuck in muddy ruts. I noticed that the tire ruts were full of blood. There was blood running down the hill. We got out of the car. The tire tracks in this whole valley were filled with blood. Dark blood-filled tire ruts and white snowy hills. There was a large group of men who lived there, dangerous backwoods subhuman-type men and what they did was slay deer. They did it for the love of killing and butchering. They were like a whole army of deerslayers. Up all along the treeline was a row of dead, gutted deer hanging from trees.

We had to spend the night there, not knowing if they would try to kill us. In the morning Frank got us out of there, though they had taken his good car and we had to drive a broken old car that was missing a door. But he got us out of there and we were going to be able to start over, to be safe and happy, finally.

Dreamed I was reading Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract and in the dream it was about Marx and genre and media were popping up in the book as I read it and I was finally understanding in the dream how Marx was connected to the other things I was working on. (The power of books theme keeps showing up in my dreams; I am desperate for reading lately and missing it badly.) Then Souls of the Labadie Tract came in the mail a few days later. It isn't about Marx but about Jonathan Edwards (I am rereading Capital, or maybe trying to read all of it for first time; have memory of reading it as u/g but not sure how much of it, so I think my dream was about essay I am attempting to work on). But these phrases from Labadie Tract held some of the dream power to me: "an inexorable order only chance creates" (p. 14); "I wanted to transplant words onto paper with soil sticking to their roots" (p. 16); "No steady progress of saints into grace saying Peace Peace when there is no peace. Walking is hard labor. Match any twenty-six letters to sounds of birds and squirrels in his mouth. Whatsoever God has provided to clothe him represents Christ in cross cultural clash conscious phonemic cacophony. Because the providence of God is a wheel within wheels, he cannot afford to dishonor any typological item with stark vernaculra. Here is print border warfare in situ." (p.17)

Peter and I decide to drive to Albany so I can read at an open poetry reading hosted by Pierre Joris (this sentence is odd in so many ways compared to my life). We arrive at the reading, and the site consists of several rooms. I'm shown to a tiny room where the reading will occur. The room has taken stylistic notes from the film "Brazil." There's a claustrophobic feeling, amps and wires everywhere. And I notice that there is so much equipment, there's no room for an audience. I'm told to read in that room by myself, and that I should note that I won't be recorded despite all the technological implements.

Afterward, as some sort of payment for reading to myself alone in a room filled with amps and wires, we're shown to a more expansive room that looks like a restaurant with a large raging fireplace. Many strangers wearing x-mas sweaters are gesturing and eating. Pierre Joris invites us to eat the only meal offered: "Medieval Jousting Breakfast."

When I wake up and tell Peter the dream, he asks if the meal consisted of large turkey legs swung overhead and root vegetables. "Omelettes, we had omelettes," I tell him.

I dreamt that I was trying to read a letter from a friend. Due to some cruel vagary of the printer, many of the letters had dropped out, the spacing was weird. Words were represented by just a few letters. Whole sentences were dropped. I was trying to read the thing, to sequence it together. Turned it over and the letter was handwritten in multicolored pencil in entirely the same manner - so the ellipses was intentional on the part of the writer. There were a set of small drawings at the bottom of the page - one of a necklace with small glass pendants - and what seemed to be a set of covers for books of poetry. Not clear if these were existing books or projected ideas for covers. I hurried to work in the dark through a strange neighborhood but went into a Calvin Klein like store and arrogantly with no intention of purchase asked the salesman to light two expensive candles that were for sale--as though trying them out. A small, brown, hairless cat watched us calmly as the man lit the candles - which turned out to be in the form of two small cats. Then, I went back out to the street. Accidentally kicked a bag on the ground. Opening the bag, a bundle of brooms fell out - primitive, archaic brooms made of gnarled yet smooth tree branches with a thatch of twigs attached; each broom of a different size and texture. I became beset with anxiousness about how to get the brooms to the writer of the letter - mail them or give them directly?

I was me. I was being introduced by Chris Merrill at Prairie Lights. I was about to give a reading.

In reality, I joked that I was a 'free agent' in the Friday afternoon workshop that the International Writing Program offers. By 'free agent', I meant that I did not belong to any organization and was sitting in on the class for my own edification.

Chris Merrill introduced me as the "A-Rod of 'free agent' poets in Iowa City."

After stepping up to the podium, I said I was more like the Andruw Jones of free agent poets: "Nobody wants me, but that doesn't make me any less awesome." The crowd laughed.

in dreams i was switching back and forth from existence as a cat—then to encounter the late cat of my daughter's and mine--prowling his old haunts in a yard we had years ago in back of place we lived in--

and going back and forth from cat to human--much as cats go back and forth limnally from human world to cat world--living alongside and among humans, then going outside among cats and animals, birds--trees--

so a poem is a movement in the grass through which one sees the
movement of a cat--the ways the fur is brushing aside the grass
blades--and making a sound in passing via the rubbing--which turns into a "rubBEing"--(the art work i do which some call rubbings/frottage i call rubBEings as they are the emergence of beings--via touch that responds to their call--)

the rubBEings move across a fence in the light, golden, which then
turns to a cool shadow--the movements of lines in fence of grey faded wooded, washed out by rains, bleached in sun and faded by shades—the myriad lines speaking and singing--voices which turn into those of cats--and back among the foliage scattered among grass, close to the ground and through cat eyes watching patiently as the cat of ours is moving slowly, imperceptibly, towards something of deep focused absolute attention that one finds glowing in its eyes--the movement for a moment suspended as the eyes grow large with the image of the prey--then the pounce--and while cat in air one's own vision is tilting wildly upwards and sees another cat spiraling down from a tree--the twisting tail that acts as a rudder to make sure the fall is completed with the cat on all fours--and there before one suddenly not a cat but a painting, as though a piece of a wall by rauschenberg has dropped from the sky--and reaching for a paint brush with my again cat
mouth teeth--beginning to paint on this wall of red and white—gleaming freshly laundered with dew in the yard where the old cat is prowling about now, a bouquet of flowers stuffed in its mouth--

speaking in french with the cat in the now dappled wall as the
sunlight has shifted and a sea-blue is flowing over the fence to the
right--which has turned a golden yellow and atop of it sitting another cat--

the morning air blew cool--le reve fraichit--calling in dreams--and
ripples among the little patches of tufted grass as now it has
changed scenery and back in a yard behind a house in watertown,
MA--and there is my little cat Max and we are building our giant shrine monument to the espresso machine, made of vacuum cleaner and car parts and gleaming bits of metallic junk--

a spaceship for time travel and wakening into this room beside the
last vestiges of departing cats pictures and poems which come back
again into another focus as one moves to rise and there finds a chair and sits and begins to draw--

the coffee and cigarette smoke of the "johnny guitar" lifestyle
wafting across beaches which elongate in th emind's eye and working on a mapping of an essay with a woman approaching the water in the sunlight of a mediterranean morning--as cold air flows in from the fresh snow covered ghetto scape--

and quiet is filing the air like smoke--streaming across paper where notations begin to emerge--and the faces of the strategies of the poems begin to move--not faces, simply markings--hatching their way into a being that begins to rise sonorously into the tranquil and chilly air among visions that swim like fish past the gazing eyes of a cat drinking coffee who turns back into a man dreaming of a poem which moves through a war and starts to
become something--in a distance--which one is in reverie of as the
coffee slowly mounts to the mouth and the morning is arriving with the feet of a desert walker suddenly finding itself in bloom among
fields--

and back one is to the memories of the cats in the dream in the yard among the grass and there in the background the fence-wall on which are forming the words eventually to become the shapes of an essay written by images projected from cats' eyes--

and becoming indeed--

something other, on a piece of a paper which turns into something
other--a continual becoming other as the words transpose always before becoming words and yet their sounds flow in,

calling

as dreams are cooling here in the morning air brought "fraichit" by the snow--

and now having written this--time to turn the eyes back to these forms here which via dreams lead onto --an essay of an essay which is filled with the skies and sea torn from a page of a memory of a dream of a film which was never made yet suggested by one that was---

The origin of the dream is simple: before bed, I spent an hour or so engrossed in Richard Stark's The Man with the Getaway Face (1963), the second of his many novels starring Parker the bank robber. The Parker novels are essentially novels about work, wrapped up in mundane detail--but because most of us readers work office jobs, we enjoy watching Parker go through all the planning and overplanning that underlies a successful heist.

Because I tend to take the tone and language of whatever I'm reading before bed straight into my dreamlife, soon after turning off the light I found myself in the midst of planning a heist. I was working with Parker, who was his usual hyper-professional self, and we were ticking off all the set-up elements that were incidental--yet crucial--to our heist. We had created false names, rented cars, stolen license plates, bought unregistered guns, timed police shifts and guard routes. More unusual, though, was that for this heist to work we'd had to create and produce an issue of a highbrow literary magazine.

Parker's every action in Stark's novels demonstrates that he knows what any conscientious worker learns at some point: that one cuts corners, however seemingly minor, at one's own risk. Rushed or incomplete efforts have a way of coming back to bite you--and in the case of a bank robbery, those unpleasant surprises are likely to lead to prison or death. It should therefore be no surprise that under Parker's direction our heist team produced a first-rate literary magazine. No faking here. It was well-planned, well-edited, well-designed, and full of interesting articles.

Which was good, because our heist went sour in the planning stages, and we called it off. Dejected, I sat in what ought to have been the getaway car, and my only consolation for the wasted money and time was the thought that I could at least read our magazine. So I opened it to the lead article, a double interview in which Anne Carson and a male contemporary American novelist (whose name I knew during the dream, but whose identity was lost to me on waking) walked through a forest and talked. Though I remember flipping through the magazine hoping to find a photo of the notoriously camera-shy Carson--to no avail--I recall nothing about the article except for the following passage, which I reproduce more or less as I read it in my dream, editorial notes as they were in the dream magazine:

CARSON: So in what way would you say you're most nineteenth-century?

MALE NOVELIST: [Chuckles sheepishly] Well, to be honest, it's probably my belief in a neo-Jameseian folkmeos. [A neo-Jamesian folkmeos is a belief that a male artist's domestic concerns naturally ought to be addressed by the women of a household. One can surely assume that the Alice Jameses, especially were they alive today, would have had some sharp comments about that belief.--Eds.] And how about you? How are you most nineteenth-century?

CARSON: Oh, goodness--I never even quite make it to the end of the eighteenth century!


"Folkmeos" appears to be a wholly made-up word--what it has to do, really, with William or Henry James I have no idea. More interesting is that despite the fact that I concentrated very hard on remembering all the details of the dream--and in particular that word--and even described the whole dream to my coworker Carrie, highlighting "folkmeos," by early afternoon I couldn't recall the word without Carrie's assitance. The mind really does want--and, presumably, need--us to forget our dreams.

I dreamt published a "poetry" book of poems and semi-nude photographs (of myself) and it sold really well.

Maureen wrote the introduction. Which is just weird.

Last Night Kept Dreaming of Creation emerging among War Torn & Bloodied Walls

For decades i have gone though periods of intense dreaming of words, letters, forms and colors on walls, walls in ruin for the most part, crumbling walls, the walls of interiors of abaondoned houses lived in, of side walls of bombed out seeming buildings in cities in many countries, and glorious walls also, simply old and covered with peeling layers of paints and signs running altogether to form completely new languages.

Since I worked for some years as a house painter this makes sense t one level, but at another, a lifelong inspiration of mine is the fictional painter Gulley Jimson in the book The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary. (It was made into a film starring Alec Guinness as Gulley.) Gulley, whose earlier works are regarded as great, has grown old and homeless, dreaming of walls he is going to paint, his new style of painting rejected except by the young. Visionary, spouting Blake to himself and others, Gulley watches for every opportunity to beg, borrow and steal his way to paints, brushes and--walls. Even walls that will be destroyed--as long as he can paint on them first.

Working as a house painter, living in abandoned buildings, walking around cities observing sites/sights/cites undergoing disintegration and demolition, one realizes that Walls are impermanent. Huge walls are being built al the time to Wall In and Wall Out--as well as all the walls around the world, small walls of homes and schools, hospitals, stores, bombed and blasted and bulldozed into oblivion. The Big Walls live on the blood of the small walls, they grow fatter and taller with the flesh of the small walls and their fragments, their dust. Yet someday they will grow so obscene they will explode . . . come crashing down--

The painter painting on the Walls and walls brings a vision of the dissolution of these bloody obscenities--these Walls which eat alive humans, fields, trees, drink up waters and blood, suck the brains and eyes out of the skull and crush the fingers and toes--

In these dreams the coming of paint and letterings and forms, colors, emerging among burnings, blastings, blood--is the energy and refusal, the resistance of Creation to the Internment Walls of Death--

Last night I dreamt that I got married. It wasn't a legal or religious marriage, just a commitment ceremony. It was in a large arts and crafts style dining room with long tables, high ceilings with beams, large windows, a long bar, and a big fireplace. My dream-self chose a nice location.

In the beginning of the dream my dress was white, and I was circulating among the guests before the ceremony. I overheard some of the older members of the groom's family complaining that they'd come all this way and it wasn't even a real marriage. This made me feel sad, and as I continued walking around my dress turned black. (It was a very beautiful black dress, though.) I thought about how committing to someone for life is, in spite of what anyone calls it, a big deal. And sure it's potentially very rewarding and fulfilling, but it's no longer just you, and that's scary. It's a kind of death, and I didn't feel these people fully appreciated that.

The time for the ceremony approached and I did not see the groom. I knew (in the dream) who he was, who I was looking for, but I couldn't find him. Since we were both reticent about marriage in general, I feared that he'd changed his mind-- but I forgave him for this, because it is a big deal.

But as I approached the room's central aisle, he was there, with a smile on his face and his hands out. And now my dream turns all Spike Lee for a moment because I came to him in a double-dolly shot. I held his hand. We followed the Mistress of Ceremonies down the central aisle toward the place we would sit during the wedding feast. She gave us a large gold chalice to drink from, and we drank.

Recurring dreams about animals. The animals are plural, friendly, and come in threes. Last week, dogs, cats, and birds in a dream-- coming to me in packs/flocks and then dissipating. The animals wanted to be taken care of, but I wasn't their caregiver (and they were healthy, but they still wanted something). Last night, a large box that held baby cows that morphed into puppies and then into very colorful baby birds (they were not ready to fly yet). John and I stood over the box and petted the animals. They were more fragile and needed care but they were not ours so we had to trust that they were being cared for by other people.

Last night I dreamed that I invited 20 contributors to participate in an out-of-town reading and offered to get them a hotel room. Of course, when I said hotel room, I meant one, for all of them to stay in -- with Chris and me. There were two queen beds, one for Chris and me and another for the other 20 poets to share. They were pissed and complained they were uncomfortable, crowded and I promised them . . . I became exasperated with their complaints and argued with the more vocal ones. Nobody was swayed. What did they expect from me? I'm just one woman, I thought. Eventually I relented and got a second room, and allowed one of the tinier poets to join my bed. Some of the contributors (Jill Essbaum, Bruce Covey, TB (? -- since when did she write poetry?) and six others) took it upon themselves to get a third room with a stocked bar. But I still got the sense everyone was disappointed with me.

I dreamt I was reading a story about a young writing prospect who was writing a story. His story was a simple one, a mystery of the old-fashioned kind, a crime, a detective. a side-kick, some traveling around in an unknown country, a wise old priest, a solution. When he was finished, it was barely long enough, but was long enough, to be a novel, so he set about finding a publisher. But first he showed it to his friend. The friend showed him the faults, and suggested ways of correcting them. First of all, the novel, if it was a novel, was disproportioned – the opening and entrainment of the narrative took too long, the denouement and proffered solution were too hasty – it felt more like a collapse than a completion. The book had the wrong shape. So it has to be longer. But above all, this novel lacked intellectual and aesthetic significance. Even in a detective story, he said, we want more than plot. We want the sense that what we’re reading is important. Give us this sense.

So the young writer hearkened to his friend, took back the manuscript and set to work. He darkened the story, deepened the characters, brooded on the landscape, discovered wiser things for the wise old priest to talk about, things that actually did seem pretty interesting, about architecture and its effect on churchgoers, about what happens to the soul when people look at trees in autumn, that sort of thing. The young writer was happy, he liked this repacking and embroidering, and soon the novel was twice as long. He showed it to his friend, the friend was satisfied, this is a really good piece of work you’ve done.

It wasn’t long before a publisher took an interest (this is a dream, remember) and gave the young writer a decent contract; soon enough the book was published, the little reviews like Kirkus and Publishers Weekly were raves, the book got into the windows of small bookshops, and had two stacks of itself on a prominent table at every B&N. Sales were impressive, though not remarkable. The young writer walked about in a swoon of delight.

Then the real review came. Big as his ambitions, serious as his novel – was it in the NYRB, or a monthly? – the review savaged the book. It told the writer what perhaps he suspected all along: the plot was compact and intelligible, the characters plausible, the local-color set pieces effective – it was, the reviewer said, a very clever piece of work. It had muscles, good bones, fair reach – but it had no heart. No heart at all. Just clever workshop stuff, a do-it-yourself project with no soul.

So the young writer went home and shot himself. In the head, or the arm, or the belly, but not in the heart. He had learned that he had no heart to aim at. Later that day, an indifferent world received the news of his by now predictable decease.

At this point in the dream, I became aware that the last sentence I had just read was a variation, parody, of the famous last sentence of Thomas Mann’s The Death in Venice, about the shocked and respectful world receiving the news of Aschenbach’s death. I realized that there was more to this sad little story I had read than I thought at first. I realized (how?) that the story actually came from a collection of linked tales, a whole book of them called Kafka’s Brother. And that the ‘friend’ spoken of in the story, who gets the boy to spoil his work with false ambitions, is actually the Kafka’s brother of the title, the unknown accompanist who guides many generations of young writers unerringly towards illusory public success and profound personal despair. It is Kafka’s brother who whispers big plans, who guides the writer’s hands towards plausible solutions and away from the structures of thought and poetry. So it is to escape Kafka’s brother that some writers on their deathbeds cry out No, burn all my work!

I was in Tivoli for some reason. I went into Tony R’s house. The downstairs was completely empty. I kept saying “hello? hello” but no answer. I went upstairs & four or five guys were there, including his youngest son. I asked him “how come there is no furniture downstairs?” he told me that the only ones who ever stay there anymore were he & his brother & that that was infrequent, since they spent most of their time traveling. He told me Tony kept coming down with liver infections but refused to quit drinking. He was seriously ill. He was in a hospital in Cherry Hill where his sister L was living. She was taking care of him.

I rode a gunmetal-blue grown-up sized tricycle from Boulder to Denver and back again. Somehow, the road was Flatbush Avenue the whole way. I made great time, better than all the traffic around me. When I got back to Boulder, A's mother was at my house and I was afraid to see her. I spied on her from the porch outside. She was welcoming an old friend of mine, but kept mistakenly/deliberately calling her Agatha. After a while I went inside and told everyone how great it felt to ride the tricycle. I tried to explain how much faster it was than a regular bike, but nobody believed it. I kept thinking: if only they knew...

I have the suitcase that doubles as a small machine for washing clothes, also the latest handheld device but already it has become dented and scratched. The device draws unwanted attention whenever I try to use it (unable to locate mute button.) The main dealer of this device and his family want to befriend me. I’m embarrassed, why do I have something so valuable which I don’t even know how to use? After leaving the airport, I walk on sidewalks between houses looking for the street where he is supposed to pick me up. This is also known as walking down an alley. When I reach the alley’s end, a long decision-making process, how to move past the debris between houses without encountering a spider. I can’t reach the street without dislodging something dirty or dangerous. I go around and around in very small circles. The street is only a few feet away but I can’t reach it. I look up finally and see the sign–not even the right street! Will we ever find each other. My suitcase keeps washing the clothes I’ve already washed. All my clothes are always wet, or half-wet.

It was one of those omnipotent dreams where you see/experience everything at once.

Death sent me $780 via PayPal.

So there was Seventh-Seal-looking-Death sitting at the computer, clicking the PayPal button.

And there I was, sitting at the computer, pleased that Death PayPal'd me $780.

Last night I dreamed we were in my son's car facing the ocean and a slender tall building sprang up far out a few feet above the water bright red electric red burnt retina red revenant red against a blue sky brick by brick the building built itself and then flicked away and a voice spoke in our heads YOU WILL FORGET EVERYTHING YOU SEE TONIGHT and a man dressed like a camp councilor a friend a leader came by with a clipboard (enemy!) to talk to us very friendly told us to stay where we were no thank you we were going to walk we got out of the car as he was locking everybody inside their cars and we ran ran up the hill toward our house and the voice in our heads spoke YOU WILL FORGET EVERYTHING YOU SEE TONIGHT and I had a pen and was writing on my knee writing it all down on my knee then my thigh then my upper and inner thigh I was writing it and the voice inside our head said YOU WILL FORGET EVERYTHING and YOU WILL HEAR ME AGAIN IN TWO WEEKS we finally made it home the empty street and I wrote it down again in my notebook so I wouldn't forget. I woke up hot my legs twitching like I'd run a marathon.

Another theatrical performance of some kind, organized & directed by HRS. It will take place on his property, which I’ve dreamed of before, though it looks nothing like his real house. A very large room with lots of grey metal folding chairs. People are starting to show up & sit down, milling around. I suddenly realize I am supposed to be in the performance, but I haven’t memorized any lines, will need to read from a script which I guess is okay because several people will be doing the same thing, but I can’t find the right script. I panic completely, and feel I have to get out of there, but my son Jake wants to stay for the show. So I try to figure out the logistics; it’s all confusing and unclear. I try to teach him how to use speed dial on my cell phone but feel very uneasy about leaving him in this place alone.

#1

I am with my deceased father in some kind of lofty like space - we're are doing that fun, gymnastic astral stuff - leaping up to the ceiling and flying around. Then, we settle down in this kind of hotel lobby, like the Algonquin? and he is showing me a velvet-covered phtograph album, very Victorian. Inside the album in a Harry Potteresque mode are sepia toned old photographs of my great- grandmother and other women. The photographs are moving like miniature movies-they are also in a hotel lobby environment having tea. My father seems to be suggesting that the answer to a secret - or something very important-is located within the motions of these people. I am striving to have them hold still, to understand what is going on.



the next day arrives in the mail a phtograph taken at a family reunion three months earlier-- which I had completely forgotten about.



#2

I'm in Coney Island under the train tracks picnicking with "mental patients" as the clients referred to themselves. We are only eating roasted red peppers. I break away from them and walk under the tracks in the shadows. There are stores and stalls here, it feels like a foreign city's bazaar sector. A man steps suddenly out of the doorway of "A xerox store" and gestures me inside. A radio is playing tango music and we start to dance, as bendable as rubber bands completely attunded. I hand him a palm-sized book on butterflies which contain poems and say: "all of these are for you."

I am trying to find my way through a rundown section of a strange, small city. I am meeting someone, and finally find the right building (early morning Hopper-like light, dusty and bright), a ramshackle storefront. As I peer through the window, I come face to face with a coyote crouched in the space slightly underneath the sidewalk. She is sleek and black and both of us finally relax as we stare at each other; her cool nose against my palm. Very busy agenda in this new place, quick car rides through the streets, up steep, rickety, wooden staircase to some apartment, split-level. It's one of those dream houses, part hotel, part old farmhouse, mish-mash of estate-sale furniture and lots of other guests. I get assigned a room, and encounter another coyote, long-legged, almost white with blotches of caramel and chesnut coloring. She is deeply joyful to meet me, and, like the other encounter, we stare and stare, her size fluctuating with the intensity of our mutual study. At one point, her nose seems to grow long and flexible, like an elephant's trunk, as she leans in to sniff my face and neck. Again, I am late for some appointment, and as I rush through the streets of this odd city (broken concrete, lots of short, steep blocks and hills), I scoop the coyote into my arms and then I am going so fast that it's as if I am wearing her mottled pelt like a wrap. We arrive at some hall, full of women who I know from all different eras of my life. We're making preparations for some party or dinner, hauling boxes of linens and table decorations. Many women are nervous about my large coyote companion, but she is so sweet and eager to please, that it's easy to treat her like a pet dog. Then, as in a film, there's a jump cut, and I am back in that hall after having been away for 10 weeks (in Asia?). Everyone expresses regrets that I have just missed Wendy M.'s graduation party (another all-female event). I've also missed a wedding and a lecture-dinner and I feel terrible about having missed these events. Wendy hands me a paper plate with a last slice of cake, and I ask about her plans next. She starts explaining her ambitions, but I can't pay attention because my coyote has leapt across the room and is pressing against my legs so avidly that it feels like our bodies are merging.

showery weather - I'm in car parked in street, London, needing to go back in the house just when a heavy shower of rain comes down - I'm in public library with book, leather-bound folio, some gilding, spine damaged, faded reed-pen drawings on end-papers by a Swedish artist who had visited here, Auckland, late 19th century - text: sentimental love-story & another text with same words in reverse order - at adjacent desk there's a woman who glances at the book as I read it - I move it because it has overlapped a corner of the book she is reading - as I turn the pages of the book I tell her it is by an artist who taught at the art-school here - I find 32 pages of drawings, chalk, pencil wash with some water-colour, bound into the front of the book - illustrations to the texts - I flip the pages, counting - several people have gathered round to look at these long- hidden drawings - I leave the library & I'm in the city as it was 30 years ago - it's raining -I have to shelter until it stops, to keep the book dry

Then to bed where I had strange dreams, most likely the result of the 'flu jab. This time I'd taken to rod and line fishing from the back door in the river that flowed right outside. I caught several large fish and then, unaccountably, a monstrous carp which grew legs and scuttled into the dark space behind the range. Dolly the Mega-cat came to my rescue and dragged the pesky thing out even though it was considerably larger than she. I woke before learning if we'd eaten the beast. It would have made good eating.

I'm on the top deck of a bus with a male friend. We're first year students (though I'm over 70) going to university. He tells me A is sitting behind us, a woman I've loved for forty years. I'm pleased: I can give her the book, White on Pictorial Space, I've brought with me as a present for her. I direct a ballet for her and my male friend. They are in their street clothes. I join them on stage making many decisive vertical and horizontal arm-movements. I explain to them my character is a wicked magician. They are unimpressed. [* John White. The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space. 1st ed. Faber & Faber. London, 1958.]

Later and somewhere else, a woman sings a new song she's written. Everyone loves the melody, but the words are not memorable. A man sings it in a cafe. 'They' threaten to shoot him in the fore-arm. The next day they do, with a bolt from a cross-bow that pins his arm to his chest. He bleeds out and dies.

I receive intermittent video text messages on the subject of validation, desire and separation. These take the form of short skits.

*

Conference participants are installed like Hollywood Squares in the wall. I can’t see or hear from my position at the base of the wall, looking up. If I had a seat in the stands I could.

*

We walk through a yard of smokestacks until we reach the cave where all the art materials are stored. We’re prying art materials up from the ground and he panics, “we’ve been in here too long.” The art materials are radioactive.

He likes me.

*

I’m in a pink tiled bathroom with a low ceiling and someone calls out an earthquake is coming, and oh also by the way, the last two women who were in this specific bathroom during an earthquake had to be removed with some kind of machinery, I’d better hurry up in there –

*

I enter and re-enter the classroom crawling on my stomach.


*

Everything is reported in the report of an unreportable dream. (a la, “when your arms are too weary”, I mean, this blog post sung to the tune of “Impossible Dream” from the Man of La Mancha.)


*

“Everyone should try to make a chart of his weariness: at what moment, under what circumstances, am I ‘a tire that deflates,’ with on top of it the feeling that, if this is the case, I will deflate indefinitely?” (Barthes, The Neutral)

My tooth fell out and cracked into three pieces. I tried to carry it around in my hand, in my pocket, in a little satchel, but again and again it grew thinner and smaller and lost. People stepped on it, it got covered in dust, fell behind things and in cracks. This happened in a dream.

I feel pale and in need of meat and bread.

Last night I dreamt a crow or raven landed on my shoulder. I say crow or raven because it was as big as a raven but looked more like a crow. I was in some suburban house with other people, it was cloudy outside, maybe early evening, and the bird landed with its claws on my shoulders and its head above mine, sort of like ...

(That's a falcon [above]. Horus, to be exact, resting upon Khafre. But you get the idea.)

Its claws were light and delicate, like a chickadee's. I said, "This bird is trying to tell me something," and I went into a meditative state, listening. Sadly, I received no message. Then the bird flew, manically, all around the room.

trying to fit a small coloured drawing into an old frame no mount wrong side out placing small thin rectangles of paper cut from another coloured drawing in the corners to hold it unlikely tho in place in the frame son won't speak to daughter mother anxious about this I apply insights about anger waking haze thoughts of feminist afflicted artist biography movie seen last night

I was rollerblading with Matina Stamatakis. We were skating fast, twisting, twirling, doing tricks across many sidewalks, past much scenery. It all seemed so fun, even liberating--but then we suddenly ended up in a large medical facility so that I could get pills for my condition. My condition had something to do with headaches and I was uncomfortable with the doctor in some unspecified way, perhaps related to his vague familiarity. It seemed we had met before, but neither of us was willing to acknowledge this. 'Nice to meet you!' I exclaimed in an overly cheery tone after he handed me my bottle of pills. I looked at the bottom of the bottle and it said, 'HEAD VAGINA SORE'. I felt slightly embarrassed that my headaches were impacting my vagina.

Then I realized that there was a second, larger bottle of pills in my pocket. It was a huge bottle of Wellbutrin. Nobody had said anything about Wellbutrin, I wasn't even sure what Wellbutrin was, but I was pretty sure it was a psych drug and part of me was disturbed that they had yet again tried to push a psych drug on me, apparently by sneaking it into my pocket. Then I took a look at the Wellbutrin pills. They were parti-colored caplets--half white, half pink. They were prettier and more delicate and less menacing looking then I had expected and I thought I might try them, after all. But the next thing I knew they had turned into bundles of bus tokens that looked like paper bingo chips--white with pink print and pink perimeters. Matina was inserting these bus tokens into something that looked like a cross between a computer and a slot machine. Perhaps it was some sort of non-traditional ATM. I'm not sure why we needed to use bus tokens to get home when we had rollerbladed there.

I am at a poetry event held in a combination city park and Juliana and Bill and Charles’ living room. The feeling sensation of the social space is that of an isolated figure in a cafe in a novel by Jean Rhys. A moment of confusion during the third act (music): the self-service bar behind the stage has become connected to the sound system. The bar consists of two garden hoses hanging over a table, operated with spray nozzles. (generic party movie, alternately, science fiction) One tube dispenses beer, the other vodka and water. The singer is screaming with a lot of care and effort into the microphone, and we can see and also hear the overall gist (radio) of this performance, but at a greatly diminished rate. Two poets are arguing loudly at the bar. We listen. The problem is that the bar-tubes have run empty. I offer my glass of water in a really imperious, judgemental way.

Afterwards, in a collective movement down the hill, everyone goes for a run around the lake but Suzanne and I are trying instead to get an appointment to have our hair cut at the same time. She is on the phone with the hair person and I am trying to take a photo of the halo around a streetlamp. I depress the button and there’s a click but it doesn’t actually take pictures, I keep seeing the viewscreen. Meanwhile, we are reviled and shamed by the hair person for trying to do something so crass as make a simultaneous appointment, and we return to my apartment. It is very bare; mostly there is a twin bed with a thin blanket, the color of GRUEL. (The Little Princess) There is a pile of discarded party clothes in one corner of the room, and my two cats are using this as a nest. They are having a kind of fit, meowing and pouncing and clawing at the green and yellow.. uh .. taffeta. The fabric is very dirty.

We go to play with the cats. My oldest cat has the face of a very old dog, he looks like a sick lhasa apso with big dark eyes rimmed by goo. I think my cat needs to go to the groomers. Then I realize a lot of his hair has fallen and is even still falling out. He has the kind of long fine skinny hair-fringe that a very bald man has when only a few strands of hair remain. And then I see how red his skin is, and greasy, and covered in scabs, and that my cat is very sick. He rolls onto his back and with every movement another fold of skin unfolds, each more hairless and uncomfortable than the next. I am rubbing his tummy and apologizing and crying and he is crying too, with the eyes and tears of a human man but a dog’s mouth, and I am trying to smooth his skin and am vigorously rubbing where it hurts and I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. More hair falls out. This scene passes and I am standing in front of the sink holding my hands in front of myself, preparing to wash them. I am trying to keep them away from the rest of my body. They are covered in dirt and hair and dried blood and flakes of skin. My cat (dog, man, part) is whimpering on the floor. Suzanne is standing somewhere behind me but I am too ashamed for anyone to see this and I wake up.

I dreamt that we were in the snow. The snow looked like the tundra. My sister was there and was looking at me from inside the snow circle near the house. She was knitting or mending. Pierre Joris was standing in open snow, wearing a parka, and the fur ruff on his hood made him look sincere. I told my sister, “That's Pierre Joris. He's a poet.” “Oh,” she said. Then Pierre came to talk to me. He had a collection of record albums indoors; we went inside to search the records and see the equipment. The phone rang. A freelance client named Matthew, who had unwillingly given up a chance to work with me to a man named Clay, was calling to warn me that Clay had ripped up a plastic milk jug in the house they rented, while claiming the jug was me. When I got off the phone, I wanted to play my “Sound Experiment” for Pierre, knowing he might like it if it were played properly with the right equipment, but it didn't seem possible: a French feminist in a caftan had come into the room and was applying cream to her elbows. She ordered the equipment. Pierre said to me, “I'm horny.” “I can read French," I told him. "If you heard my French, you would laugh.” My sister stayed outside near the snow circle mending.

Last night I had a lucid dream. I dream I am in a school and in the moment of realizing i'm dreaming, i see a man and i want to touch him to see if my hand will go through him, since we're in a dream. i ask him if i can touch his hand, and i do, and its warm, and fleshy like a real hand! which amazes me and makes me laugh. he looks at me confused, and i just walk away. i see out the window: since i'm dreaming, can I teleport to that grassy lawn over there? No, somehow knowing I was dreaming brought with it the limitations of the physics of waking life.But I was totally fearless and looked for a long time into the eyes of an older man, a teacher, to see if he knew it was a dream, but i could tell after a while that he didn't know, and also, i could see, somehow, his...ethical, his moral limitations, his closed off ness, and i was a little bit disappointed that i couldn't share in the experience of knowing it was a dream we were in. next to him was another woman, also a teacher, i said to her, smiling: "we're in a dream...how are we going to wake up?" and she and the man next to her looked at me like I was crazy. we were at a school next to a small lake with grassy green hills...I was walking around looking into peoples eyes trying to ascertain who knew it was a dream, if anyone did, but no one did, and i was feeling fearless joy of dream gnosis in my heart, but longing to meet someone else who knew. Then a younger college guy wanted to be my lover and I was walking with him, his also younger girlfriend appeared and i said is that your boyfriend? And she said yes. I said, you two are beautiful together, and she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him away and he tried to take my hand to take me with them and I broke away from him and lightly pushed him, waved him away, shooed him off, gesturing to him to go with her...it was easy and amusing...at some point i became thirsty, seeing a water fountain and saying, hmm. i wonder. I'll try but i doubt it will work. so i drink from the water fountain and of course, it doesn't quench my thirst b/c its dream water. so I think, should I wake up and drink some of the water next to my bed?

Each spot (lesion) has a hard, knobby miniature object shaped like a barbell inside, which I can trace/feel through the skin, and which causes the skin to be distended. I have an infinite amount of these hard pockets-flaps on my torso and legs and shoulders and back, and when I take a bath they float away from my body slightly, and become translucent (jellyfish). In the bath, when each pocket lifts up and away from the skin, it’s like being covered in grasses, in the water I’m a field, i.e. the kind that would be on a bluff, overlooking the sea. But when I am not in the bath, they are hard, and I can’t tell if they are inserted (plastic) or not. These bulbous growths. I struggle against the thought that only surgery can remove the alien barbells from my skin, and yet I know it’s true. During this time I am in an isolated house with a man who still wants to have sex with me.

Last night: dreamt that I had a golden retriever and went back to school for an MBA.

Last night I had nightmares. One involved moving to Michigan. I was unhappy in Michigan.

I’m having a whole series of strange, disjointed dreams this past week. I almost said ‘enjoying’, and would have if the cumulative effect wasn’t enervating and, very slightly, disorientating.

For one thing, I’m always younger in my dreams and it’s awfully good to be striding through fields and forests rather than shuffling along looking for safe points to lodge my stick. And it’s certainly the only way I get to walk up a mountain.

It’s a combination of inactivity and unsuitable diet, I suspect. No great issue. It’ll pass, and the only reason I record it is because that’s what I do. Record things.

Walking through Los Angeles, a seedy outlying tract more like old Brooklyn or Chicago, vacant lots stretching out, rare buildings. One of them in a building all by itself, like the last house left standing from a row of attached houses, is an old bookstore: in the window are ranged impressive sets of leather-bound volumes: one multi-volume set "The Flora of New Guinea." I call out to Ted Enslin who is walking with us, and prompt him to look in the window. We are astonished at that set -- of course the store is closed.

I insist that my father get credit for the glass face of the sun. It was his idea. Two young men stand near a work of art they claim is theirs, but I know it belongs to my father. Sure he didn't make it, but they followed his plans. The glass face of the sun glares up at the real sun. It measures the time. The lips are pink. I tell the men a brass plate inscribed with my father's name and a line about his inspiration will do just fine. They can't unveil it until he gets his due.It was my father's idea – the sun.

1.

I am in a large mansion. Many people who might be poets I've read are there. I once thought I saw Walt Whitman working as an orderly in a Minneapolis hospital while getting stitches in my head by David Copperfield, the magician. This mansion has a large ballroom, as all mansions do where all of these people are gathered. I am in a back room, being encouraged to urinate into a bookbag. With my penis drawn, I relieve myself into this bookbag.

Fortunately, I woke up dry.

2. Read 'No Exit'? My friend Juli and I are in a hotel room with a large window to one side. Actually, it might not be a hotel room at all. It's just a room with a door, two armchairs, and a large window. The color of the room is salmon/pink. There is a greenish trim. It looks like someplace old people go to die. Juli is standing in the center of the room as I sit in the chair. She is heavy bored. She suggests a party. I tell her we have no provisions, nor do we have anyone to invite. She suggests sleep. I tell her there is no where to lay down and I refuse to sleep in the suit I have on and refuse to be naked around her. Visibly upset, Juli suggests breaking the window to get out. I tell her there is no where to go outside the window: it is an illusion. She sits down in her chair, and I suggest we listen to some music. She informs me there is no music.

3.

Johannes Goransson and I are in a cave not enclosed on both sides. Just rock that comes over a small space with a stream that runs through the middle. There are fish in the stream and we are hungry. Johannes takes his flashlight and begins tying leaves together in order to fish with the new pole. Waiting, I imagine a new scenario. Suddenly, I grab the flashlight and start beating at the fish in the shallow stream. Soon, we are feasting on the raw fish, still withering between our teeth.

A large snake and a primordial dwarf were playing in the same bowl, supervised by the dwarf's parents, who were looking on in amusement. Afer what was initially perceived as a playful tussle between snake and dwarf, the dwarf was suddenly gone--and it was realized that the snake had swallowed the dwarf whole. One of the adults picked up the snake, stretched open its mouth and peered inside, and called to the dwarf. No response. Someone had a brief thought about cutting the snake open to retrieve the primordial dwarf from within, but that idea was decided against. Instead, the snake was returned to its bowl, beside which a dog dish filled with water and a large dog biscuit were placed, in the hopes that these items would lure the primordial dwarf from his new womb.

In a park with a gazebo, perhaps the day after a county fair, with hay scattered among trampled grass, I was trying desperately -- to the point of tears -- to convince two girls selling cheeseburgers out of a paper bag, to sell me three cheeseburgers for my schizophrenic brother who had locked himself in the gazebo & had been there all night in an "episode." knew that my brother needed three cheeseburgers in order to regain control, but the girls said that he didn't need three, that he only needed two, & they were strict in their refusal. My brother's face had disappeared. His torso was turned facing me at times, but his face was gone, as if rubbed out. I was screaming, flailing at the girls for three cheeseburgers. They eventually ran away.

Stumble through the hall of morning's first moments. Familiar rumble outside from the construction across the street. Into and out of the bathroom. Into and out of the dream. Into and out of the thoughts that aren't there. There might have been a dream, sitting in a cell block, looking at a clock through iron bars. Some chubby guard with a dumb grin, fuzzy eyebrows, and big blue clothes. Big ol' Hollywood keychain hooked to his big black belt. Pacing the hall in his big black boots. Down into the morning, Vaughn at her desk in the kitchen, cranking out the multi-colored Play-Doh. Dash tottering between Vaughn and his mom as he learns how to walk. Magnets across the floor—an orange g, a green o—and tupperware and toy silverware, and toy-sized tins that either are or aren't toys I have no idea. Sometimes my guts want to give up and seep back into the earth. The little noises too much. The excesses, the effusions, the never enoughs. Vague and dizzy feelings cradling objects. "The sky / is a black / sudden cloud, / a sun. / Speak / to me, say / what things / were forgotten." (Creeley, from "The Shame")

I'm at the farm where I pick up organic vegetables every week. It's winter (odd), and the veggie room is lit with electric lights (odd), and an acquaintance who is a homeless-looking meadmaker is waiting around (for what?). Before I choose which vegetables I'll bring home, I look through every bin to see what's available. I'm stunned to find that the last bin is packed tightly with small pastel tote containers of Dunkin Donuts Munchkins (how do they grow these?). I'm ecstatic to slowly realize that Gertrude Stein was wrong: sugar IS a vegetable. At last... I wake up content.

We are in England and we come across three people -- two men and one woman, all very young -- who are producing a TV series on the Civil War, based on a poem by the famous poet Cecil Blakeley. They're making everything by hand -- not just the sets and costumes, but the cameras and technical equipment too. I tell them they should use the Civil War poem by Robert Kelly instead, but as I'm saying it I realize Robert has never written an epic poem on the Civil War. They shoot at night and make things during the day. They tell me they only have a certain number of hours in which to finish the epic. "American hours are shorter than English hours," I say. One of the men is distantly related to the woman -- they come from the same small island off the northern English coast -- the name sounds like Farquelay. When we see them it's 12:50 AM and the actors are starting to appear on the set, including one man with long hair dressed as a medieval knight, carrying a small digital camera.

A dream of dust. It lies along the edges of all the bookshelves, on the tabletops in the study, the sitting room, the kitchen, it congeals on the ledges of the skirting boards and on the wainscotting, on the pelmets, everywhere. The glass-topped dresser. The windowsills. I run my forefinger along the flat wooden surfaces, pushing up cloudy skirls of grey and brown and letting them fall onto the dun-coloured carpet which, later, I think (in the dream) I will vacuum. The windows themselves are golden with grime that filters the late afternoon sun to revelations of dust and one day I will hang out of those that open and clean them too. Or inscribe them with sigla encoded perhaps with the secrets of time. The dream has a soundtrack, it is Mazzy Star, Hope Sandoval's melancholy voice drifting in and out of the debris: I could possibly be fading / Or have something more to gain / I could feel myself growing colder / I could feel myself under your fate / Under your fate. Never knew until this actual moment that that was what she was singing. This moment of awakening, slipping across the purple sheets, rolling out from under the blue duvet, looking for those dust devils. And they're gone. Or rather, not here. It's just the ordinary familiar chaos of things. Feathers, stickers peeled off apples, sequins fallen from the kaleidescope, crumbs. Where has the dream dust gone? What is dust anyway? Planetary dust. Dust of light, dust of skin, dust of books. Curators are advised no longer to wear white gloves, the abrasion of cotton causes as much damage to paper surfaces as the oils in the whorls of fingertips. Dust of tears, what's left after the liquid evaporates and only the salt remains. The heart's dust. Or the galaxy's. It was you breathless and tall / I could feel my eyes turning into dust / And two strangers turning into dust / Turning into dust ...

Sometimes I have dreams where I find/remember a room or series of rooms in my home that I haven't been using. In last night's instance I found a guest room with a spare bath, walk-in-closet and a great loft office above it. TB was all "You have this and haven't been using it?" and I was like "I hadn't considered it before."

I wanted to get into an exclusive party but the restaurant maître d' insisted I needed an invitation. I wasn't dressed for the thing, but managed to convince him I belonged there. All I wanted was to get inside to see if I knew anyone. I looked around and was reminded of many a bad wedding reception, with tens of strangers huddled together at small tables, smiling politely, desperately wanting to leave. I recognized no one, but noticed everyone had dark hair. I left and went outside where it was now dark and snowing. I hurried in the cold (for which I was not properly dressed) to the parking lot to get my car, but it was locked behind two separate fences. I jumped both fences, found my car, and put my key in the lock. This simultaneously started the ignition, which alerted the two parking lot guards who immediately came running over and "arrested" me for leaving a baby in the car. I didn't remember doing this, didn't recognize the baby at all, but still felt horribly guilty for doing such a terrible and thoughtless thing. The baby seemed all right. The guards calmly spoke to each other about me as if I weren't there. They took notes on all my crimes, and confiscated all my belongings including a pillow I've had since childhood, and a copy of Lee Ann Brown's Polyverse. Something about their calm demeanor made me feel I was in the worst trouble I've ever been in my whole life.

Soon we are tossing and turning ourselves to sleep on the lumpy air mattress. I wake up frequently with dreams I think I'll recall in the morning but of course I won't. I remember only the one bit of a dream where I was with my family in some kind of lodge with a deck out back and a sliding glass door, and pacing out there was Jordan Davis, someone I've never met and know nothing about except for visiting his blog a few times and I think he co-edited The Hat, and anyway he's out there, looking like D.H. Lawrence, wanting to kill me, but only in a nonchalant "maybe I will, maybe I wont" kind of way.

Last night I had a dream, a big sloppy thing that went on for hours and involved lots of people which my dreams usually don't but it started in Alec Neal's garden, Alec Neal who has a small homestead right outside of town with a stand where he lines up jars of syrup and braided garlic heads and sets them there to stand next to a can and asks via a printed price list for maple syrup and garlic braids and trusts that you will pay him fairly and squarely and I've been eyeing his corn growing strong and tall all early summer long, knee high by the fourth of July and still going strong, full green, light green corn, sweet corn, not sprayed or nothin he says and I see the rows of marigolds growing there in between and overhead is a large plastic owl of a pole, sortofa scarecrow, first year we've done this, he says, does it work? I guess, he says, the corn looks pretty good, don't it? he says from the center of the patch where I can't see him but hear him plucking off the ears, ripping them off the stalks with the sound corn music makes in the middle of the summer being taken from the land, from the grand stand it is on and then he comes out grinning with the 8 in his arms while I give thanks, I have not made such a fair purchase in many a year, 2 dollars for 8 fresh ears and here he is coming at me with them in his arms, light green huskers, no bag or anything just outstretched arms I open up to accept, to make a small contribution, to switch the bucks for ears, and what am I giving him? two dollars, which I can only do by filling the left arm first with the first four and then offering him the 2 bucks with my right hand until he takes it, until he can free me to take the other four and here he is hesitating, he is hesitating isn't he, not taking the money or handing over his ears because these are his babies, baby silver queens, baqbies he's been babying all season and at first he gives me four and holds on to the rest as I am standing there with the four in my left arm and the two dollars still outstretched as he is standing there waiting now, waiting for something to happen with the other 4 ears still left in both his hands, hard working hands, not going for the money but just standing there holding on to them, outside the corn patch, which isn't sprayed or nothin' and is real green and smells of corn that smells real clean and sweet in mid summer, fresh and alive, fresh and green, not wanting the money, not wanting to give up the corn he has babied along all season and yet there is a sign right there along the road that reads "sweet corn" and if that is not a sales pitch what am I doing here offering these 2 measly dollars that he does not want to put back into the corn, back into the patch and leaves it at that and then we are in an elevator in NYC, going up, I and two others in this cranky old elevator that is tiny, one that barely holds two and we are three as the iron gate closes and rises within the shaft holding us tight, we are going up and almost too tight to breathe so I hop atop of my basket full of groceries so that I can fit with these other two who barely know me and when the elevator stops and opens up I have to pop down and out and haul around my basket so the other fellow can get out, I remember him now, he was a good friend to my but he is dead now and then we are all out in some sort of station or wharehouse in NYC with barnlike qualities and further on we are many, a whole lot of us, in some place that is unfamiliar but not alien, a place we are all moving through in the same direction, moving rather calmly for a crowd as if we are all going to a fair or something fun at the other end and there is just the movement of us then, of the tide in us, of moving forward then.

Ed Sanders had built a rollercoaster/bobsled-on-wood type of thing that traveled from town hall to town hall; but it was in a city. There was some significant political PR event that was going on or about to go on at all of these places, and it was his idea to disrupt it. So my husband, my kids & I started riding around with him and maybe five other people; the only one I recognized was Ron Silliman. We rode from town hall to town hall and at each one Ed had made up a skit or theatrical production or song, different for each stop, that would end up with a big surprise insult to the officials, which was somehow hopefully going to disrupt this bad, corrupt event that was about to happen. Exactly what the skits or songs were, as I woke, became very vague; as was the nature of the corruption we were attempting to disrupt. At the end of the dream I realized that my son Jake had gotten off the ride a stop or two back, and I was desperately, frantically trying to find him in this city that I did not know very well.

I sit down next to Sartre at an outdoor table at a café in India. I'm not sure where exactly -- it looks a little like New Delhi. Definitely a large city. Sartre, apparently, has not died but has moved to India because he prefers the warmer climate. He looks quite young. He points to the newspaper open on the table in front of him (The Times of India) and says how glad he is that they've finally found a cure for tuberculosis.

Running through a field of tall grasses. Running from something, but not from something too terrifying. More like running from the cops from a keg party in the woods when we were kids. Though I don't notice it at the time the horizon is startling for its lack of trees or houses or buildings of any kind. It's an incredibly long field that touches the clear blue sky at the horizon. The quickly repeating shushing sound of every step—shhh, shhh, shhh through the tall grass. Soon the sound grows unnaturally loud, so loud it makes me dizzy and knocks me to the ground. Faceful of grass. I turn around under the immense sky, just enough time to recognize the sound of galloping before a red-brown horse races past, hooves no more than a foot away from pummeling my skull. I gather myself, stand, and turn to look at the horse racing away. My little girl crouched on its back, gripping the reigns, leaning forward, head beside the horse's, as if to whisper, "Faster."

Dreamt a doctor took care of us last night

after solving our little medical dilemma

let us stay the night in his odd office



you woke early in our cramped corner

and slept again more comfortably

on his examination table cushioned, blanketed



my problem was to wash or shower

but the shower was in an ordinary room

wooden floor, couldn’t grasp the concept



how wash without ruin room

washed gingerly with hand and towel

and no one woke, Dr Bident was gone



a kindly mousy little man

like Ralph Gordon fifty years ago

who taught us the scansion of English prose.

Dreamed that I was going to move back into my old apartment in Annandale. To get upstairs you had to walk into the downstairs apartment. There were about four women there in the downstairs apartment, none of whom I recognized. But they were nice, though somewhat wary of my moving in above them and all seemed to be artists and I figured fairly relaxed in general. They were sitting around a big square table having a discussion that I guessed I had interrupted.

Upstairs the apartment was many more rooms, and the rooms were large and full of stuff. Two old tvs were crowded into one room and there seemed to be lots of miscellaneous childrens' toys. I thought to myself that Charlotte must have nieces and nephews that come to visit. There was a small toy train. And there was a toy...reptile or something that seemed to be moving and I was surprised that it had been left on and there were still batteries in it that worked. Later Robert was showing me how the toy could climb the legs of tables and things, and that the toy had a toy that it loved, as if the toy were a pet and the toy reptile would climb up the table legs and pick up its more toy-like toy and carry it around.

Earlier I was looking through the rooms, trying to figure out which I wanted to live in. The back rooms were large and the windows were open and I knew they would be good rooms to write in. The rooms seem to be laid out in a mirror kind of configuration, but there were extra rooms. My old friend K was going to be moving in with me again. I wondered where Charlotte had moved her office to, but figured she had moved it back into the other house. A (now realized recurrent aspect) part later where I had to walk up very rickety steps, about 3 stories, to get to R's back porch, which was teeny tiny, like a watchtower, and in which he didn't spend much time, even in the summer.

Even earlier I had explained to him that it was ridiculous that I had been repeating highschool yet again for no apparent reason (a dream I just realized is a recurrent one), especially at my age, especially when there was nothing particularly new to study, and so I was going to drop out & move back to Annandale, which in the dream was much further away than in real life. I was going to have to find a job, which I sort of looked forward to, but I felt very sad about leaving my Red Hook house when I thought about it, so in general I tried not to think about it.

It was as if my son had grown up & moved away; but I don't know where my husband was (worried now upon waking that he had died and I was a widow again in my dream).

Also earlier was trying to find a place in Annandale to buy a pack of cigarettes, which, like the endless highschool loop dream, I just discovered is a recurrent one. It seems I have convinced myself in my dreams that I can smoke only occasionally and in moderation, even after having been a heavy smoker for 22 years, but not having smoked for the past 12 years. So in my dreams I am an occasional smoker. Ha!

My wife - in this part of the dream I'm married - will not be pleased with my visitor not because he is a writer but because he is a communist. He looks like Peter Bogdanovich. There's a flea on the carpet. I catch it, but don't squash it, throw it out an upstairs window. I go out the window, thinking it will be easy to climb down to the ground that way. Part of the wooden edge of the roof comes away in my hand. Some other pieces of wood from the roof crumble, as they always do in dreams like this. I can't get back in through the window. It's a long way to fall. Conversation with a dear woman friend - I'm not married - in which I'm hamming it up pretending to be annoyed, saying I'm doing it because we never have quarrelled and I want to see how we we'd manage a serious difference. But that doesn't work, we laugh about it. Then she's standing there dressed like Audrey Hepburn in last scene of 'Breakfast at Tiffany's', maybe it is Audrey Hepburn. She's saying there is a difficulty about our relationship, that I want children. I know she doesn't and I'm saying that I don't.

In my dream this morning I am visiting Gerald Murnane. I have been out walking with him and we run into a person who asks whether we will get ‘unmarried’.

‘No,’ I said, ‘never married, not he and I.’ I can see that GM is thrown by the question as if it brings us too close. He has written me a letter about his experience of paragliding. I imagine him in the air hands outstretched, arms in front, gliding under the safety of his umbrella parachute. His buddy only inches above him. In his letter and in my imagination, GM has started to doubt his ability. He starts to doubt the safety of the wind currents. Paragliding in my dream requires a certainty of purpose. The glider must believe in what he is doing. The glider must be confident in his movements. Any jerkiness, or sudden disruption to his movements can cause him to get out of sync with the wind current on which he glides and he can fall like a stone. (I had similar thoughts landing in Melbourne yesterday night on my return from the conference. I saw the lights of Melbourne scattered below like a widespread Christmas tree and imagined as we drew nearer at what point it would be safe for the plane to lose control. I did not anticipate the landing. I had stopped looking out the window and suddenly the gut wrenching thump of the plane’s wheels on the tarmac, the fuselage trembling and the adrenaline rush to my underarms and we were safely landed.)

Meanwhile in my dream GM is up in the air trying to wrest back control of his mind from his fear. He describes this process to me in a letter and I draw parallels between that fear and his fear of our relationship, which I sense is accelerating. Soon he will want to have no more of me.

I am in his bedroom now, in my dressing gown. He has pointed out the stained glass image of the Blessed Virgin at the front door and another image etched in glass on another door further down the hall way. He lives in this house with his mother. I only visit when I am sure she is away.

GM’s mother does not approve of GM having relationships with women. This is part of his fear. The door to his bedroom opens.

‘Mother,’ GM says. A beautiful woman with dark way hair and an angelic face stands at the threshold looking in aghast at the sight of this other woman, me as I am now, sitting on the floor in my dressing gown.

‘Gerald,’ she says, ‘get her out of here’, as if to say get rid of that thing. I have become a filthy object, the sight of which is unbearable.

GM leaps from the bed, a dutiful son. ‘Yes mother, yes mother.’

Gerald’s mother is not alone. Her friend looks in over her shoulder. This friend and I exchange glances. This friend will intercede, I hope.

‘I will need to get dressed first,’ I say as I gather my clothes that are scattered around the room.

Gerald’s mother walks off to the kitchen. Her friend hovers nearby.

‘She can’t possibly be serious,’ I say to the friend. ‘Gerald’s a grown man for god’s sake. He even looks older than his mother.’ This is true. GM’s mother looks as though she is in her mid to late thirties, an attractive dark haired woman, who could herself be looking for someone. Like the actor, Gemma Craven, married to the hero Arthur in Pennies from Heaven.

I dress in the bathroom, the same bathroom as the one I used as a child in Cheltenham and Camberwell, a cross between the two. Green linoleum on the floor, a tatty plastic shower curtain with a line of water stain caressing the bottom.

I wake before I have a chance to remonstrate with GM about his subservience to this woman. She’s his mother for god’s sake. She should let him go.

Something happening I can't remember. Then daylight and I'm in a dormitory with cubicles plain white walls and bare. I've been staying temporarily as a visitor with some dancers. They take no notice of me: I don't speak their language. I'm getting ready to leave, waiting for my son to tell me the way to the station. He tells me it's a short walk away. As I walk along the platform with soldiers and others, I accidentally hit the leg of an officer with the corner of my small suitcase. I apologise. He makes out it's of no consequence, but I notice he's now limping. It's a bright sunny day. The train is in, but I see that many of the carriages are full. My son urges me to get quickly into the last carriage as the train is ready to depart. I step onto a broad wooden step - a much extended running-board - at the doorway of the carriage but there's no door. I stand there and there's just time to say 'I hope I see you again soon'.


The carriage is an old wooden one, crudely furnished with various cheap chairs and benches. The seats are mostly taken. There's a compartment with beds with people stretched out on them covered with grey blankets. Some people are sitting at little tables laid for dinner. I can't sit there: I haven't got any money. To get to a seat I have to climb over a row of spindly chairs with high backs. There are several people sitting on them. The row of chairs goes right across the carriage. I try to throw one leg over the back of a chair. But I can't do it and say to a woman sitting there, 'I'm not a dancer'. She doesn't understand that I'm explaining why I can't climb over them that way. When I have climbed over, rather clumsily, I tell her I'm only a social dancer. Finally I get to sit down.


Almost immediately a man's voice calls out 'Silence!' Two men come in carrying a stretcher with a dead soldier on it, lifting it above our heads. Then two more come in with another stretcher, with a seriously wounded soldier on it. Behind me, as he deposits the dead body on the side of the railway track one of the men is saying 'What else can I do, other than dust it with chalk?'.

The sadness of parting with my son wakes me.

A lot of people are in a large hall with cushions in front and chairs in the back and a movie screen on the wall facing the audience. Ann Lauterbach comes in and starts narrating a black-and-white silent film she had made called Derek and Nora's Tumble. We see a boy and a girl in their teens falling sort of haphazardly down a hill. Godard comes in and sits on one of the cushions. Ann explains the deeper meaning of the film -- falling and redemption -- and points out symbols in the various scenes that we hadn't noticed before.

He's in his forge, the tiny wooden building's window glowing orange, but static, no movement in the light, as if trapped and blurred in a photograph. And I feel like a camera. I'm a witness device, recording something happening at dusk, as if this is a particular day. Always with him, ice and gravel cracking under foot. I take some evidence, an inventory: carpenter's musk; manipulated tin; rust colored paint; talk and tedium; dinner in the near future; a bench; blood/blushing; blue sweater tattoo. Wherever we move, he and I are always the same distance from one another, I begin to suspect. I test this every way I know-- which involves saying and listening and other things, smaller and making less sense-- and find that it's true. The exact distance seems to be constant, no matter what.

On a flight to Turkey, Klaus Kinski berates me for taking Werner Herzog’s side against him after we watch “My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski” together on his iPhone. His bloodshot, cerulean eyes—always already bulging—are strained near the point of socket explosion as he screams and rants at me: you are hardly the exquisite writer I buried 10 years ago! His contorted, enraged face is so close to mine, I end up breathing in the sweat off his forehead.

I notice a hat pin holding a deeply luscious, humid, creamy gardenia to his lapel. I think of using the pin to puncture the whites of his eyes if he tries to strangle me—which is what he threatens to do. He moves to grab my throat but his hands fall instead on the notebook lying open on my lap, which he searches frantically for evidence of my true hatred for him. I try to stay calm and explain that Herzog was only trying to make everyone believe Kinski was insane in order to promote a greater interest in his films. I point out, too, that I'm not the person he buried. That I'm still very much alive, and that in fact, it is Kinski who is dead.

Suddenly in control of himself, he dismissively replies: only the grim poet needs to point this out.

I dreamt that Charles Bernstein and Richard Tuttle, who have collaborated before, were presenting a new piece. It was a large piece, perhaps 3'x2', of sepia-tinged translucent glass. Superimposed onto the glass were almost illegible words that had been put through a dirt filter; a picture of a Japanese man driving a car; and telephone wires. In the dream, everyone gasped at its beauty.

I dreamt I was in some sort of hotel or boarding house with many floors. I was just moving in and my luggage was stored in someone else's room. When I go into the room I see John Ashbery there picking up his luggage. He sees lying on an end table a piece of yellow silk charmeuse with a ribbon attached to the top so it can be hung like a banner or a prayer flag. On the silk is typed a long Shakespeare monologue, but I couldn't see which one – it was about the length of "To be or not to be," with the same sort of line lengths. He looks up smiling from reading it and says it reminds him of a beach in England where there are very long waves – I can't remember the name of the beach, but it began with H. Hellespont? Anyway, H_____ Beach was famous for its surfers but especially for a group of blind surfers that surfed only there. JA said that the imagery in the monologue was just like seeing the blind surfers at H______ Beach.

Guam, where there are no longer any birds. I walk into a mess of spider webs. Spiders and spiders, and no birds to eat them.

I paw through the webs, wanting to be brave about it, not squeamish and afraid. I am uncomfortable but push forward anyway. These webs are lovely, and unlike any real-life webs I’ve seen. These are curlicued swirls of fine cotton. Mist-like and seemingly substanceless. They stick to me anyway, and everywhere. To my face, hands, and clothes.

I sweep my way along. Someone else is there, and they don’t warn against what I’m doing. This adds to my confidence, so I continue.

Next thing, hundreds of extremely tiny amber spiders are everywhere on me and biting. I rub at them and try to kill and smack them away. They mostly get my hands, but I feel one now and then up around my neck or in some hard to see place. I look carefully. There are equally tiny and similarly colored scorpions on me as well. It is horrible but I realize I can’t freak out. I have to keep it together to get them off me.

After a while I am clear of them all. My hands are puffy, warm and hurting. I look at them and see hundreds of tiny bumps. The spiders have laid their eggs under my skin. I don’t know what to do, and realize I need a doctor to help. I fight an urge to take a knife to my skin and cut the eggs away. I want to pop them like little caviars, but worry this may not be the best thing to do. I think of drowning them by immersing my hands in something caustic like vinegar. This is all I remember.

We owned this huge Victorian mansion somewhere and everything but us within it was "period", except for the implied use of electricity. I am standing in the upstairs hallway with an electric typewriter at my knees, attempting to rip the keys out with my nails. Getting nowhere, I took from the closet a chisel and hammer and began striking in between the keys in this manner. Despite the sparks and shards of a stone-like material, the typewriter remained in tact.

Running down the hall way, I am into a room with a desk and windows, one of which I open, and then grabbing it by the cord, dangle the typewriter outside of it. My wife is on the floor, begging and pleading with me not to throw it out as I simultaneously accuse everyone for making me drop it to a mangled pyre below. At the last minute, however, I break down, and crying, pull the typewriter back in and hold it in my arms, a baby. "I can't do it!" I scream.

Next, I am downstairs in the parlor (or what I assume now to be a parlor) where there is a carousel with a thick black cord running to a statue, her hands poised above a stone organ. Then, the statue began playing, but it wasn't just the organ: a whole band came out in the simple chords on the organ, all playing Sister Ray by the Velvet Underground. The carousel lights up and begins to whirr to the strains.

Leaning into the statue, my wife asked, "Doesn't she look like Laura Ingalls Wilder?"

"No! Of course she doesn't!" I responded. Then, as I leaned in for a better look, Laura Ingalls Wilder's face turned into a screaming ghost, like at the beginning of Ghostbusters.

I was in a very cluttered, labyrinthine house, lost. One side of the house's facade was missing, exposing it to the outside. The house was some kind of group home for adults with disabilities, and I was there as a staff member, there to care for them, though in each room I entered I felt deranged and couldn't tell the difference between the disabled and the other staff members there as workers.

While walking into some room where no people were I suddenly shit my pants in a single, swift burst. The shit ran through my pants and made an instant trail, which seemed to encompass the entire floor-space of the room. As I was trying to simultaneously clean the floor and remove my pants — panicked and embarrassed — Bethany Wright came into the room. When she saw me she burst into tears — in as quick and short a burst as my shit. She then disappeared as I continued to try frantically to clean my mess, and came back a few minutes later, smiling beneficently, offering a clean issue of clothing.

I then put on the clothing, and donned over it a black garbage bag, and continued through the house.

Late afternoon languor, tedium, residua. The Phoenicia Volunteer Fire Department arrives in three giant pickup trucks, none of which are official trucks, but each of which has impromptu scaled-down police lights on its roof. The assembled concerned citizens demand to search the house for fire hazards. My step-mother, three younger sisters and brother are all present. The Phoenicians are horrified that so many seemingly sophisticated strangers are living in a small house—they don't realize that the family is only on vacation. The volunteers meticulously go through my personal belongings. When I think no one is looking, I try to hide incriminating items. One concerned citizen picks up a personal check for a sizeable sum, reads it, shows it to her husband, and says "see, it happened to him too." I assume that she is referring to a certain questionable real estate agent. "I can prove it, I say," trying to ingratiate myself to my fellow citizens, whom I assume have been similarly wronged by the same real estate agent, herself a foreigner from Woodstock. The husband and wife are unimpressed by my attempt at conversation and do not reply. They continue to search my belongings. It is only at this point that it occurs to me that these citizens need a warrant.

The citizens are quiet, nosy, almost bestial—like the invaders in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, but not as rowdy. I think maybe I am in a film: the home under seige is probably the central motif of horror andwestern films from The Searchers to Scream. Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs is merely the most extreme embodiment. I should be more welcoming, less patriarchal, less territorial. The home invaders eye my books with particular suspicion.

The inspection seems to be going badly. One man says he will have to cite me for my barbecue being too close to the house. Another man is rummaging through the electrical panel, with a mixed look of disapproval and confusion, as if he hated this technology he didn't understand, but knew that he should understand.

My family seems annoyed with me for taking all this so seriously. They seem unconcerned about the home invasion. At one point my sister reproaches me for being so disorganized. What did I expect? Naturally visitors should be appalled by my lifestyle.

The increasing incompetence of the inspectors is becoming apparent. One of them drives a massive Hemi V-10 truck into a smaller pickup accidentally. The smaller truck rolls over against the side of the house, and is left there lying on its side. No one seems much concerned. The occasional lethargic reproachful glance is cast my way: otherwise the Phoenicians carry on about their tasks. It seems as though they have decided to move in.

At this point, I decide to make my last stand and mention the issue of the warrant. Some of the locals are now sitting down nonchalantly. The house has grown in size. As I prepare to confront the citizens, I realize I am in the Phoenicia Diner. This is no longer my property. I awake.

[Yesterday before bed I was reading Adorno's Dream Notes and earlier in the day had written the following lines from Dickinson in my notebook;

I am alive- because
I do not own a house. (605)

Did Nietzsche have a mortgage in Sils-Maria?

Adorno [while dreaming]: "She asked me why I made fun of myself in my
dreams and, without thinking, I answered: to fend off feelings of
paranoia" (Dream Notes 54).]

In a darkened classroom with bare concrete walls and floors, crowded with mostly middle-aged overweight people.

A trailer for a movie, made by someone I didn't like (and who was also gregariously present in the room), was being projected against the wall. The trailer was an arial shot of a long row of truck trailers forming a circle, with the voicover, "Come see my new movie, 'Allen Ginsberg and Me Waiting for the Long Bus.'"

Everyone was laughing hard, but I was angry. I stood up and shouted, sarcastically, "Don't you think this is just a little politically heavy handed?!" As I sat down I made eye contact with Lyn Hejinian, who I knew was there (though I had been trying to avoid her so to avoid the possibility of embarrassing myself), and who gave a very emphatic "Yes!"

But no one else had heard Heijinian, or me. They were all still roaring, and most had left their seats and were walking around the room, which had become something of a party.

zebras on the side of the road
as big as two-story houses
and huge hyenas
and even a lion or two
but my car
that I'd parked
by the road—
vanished

Well, I forgot to put flowers under my pillow. I dreamt that I was in a large classroom full of people sitting "Indian-style on the rug" in a circle. There were two large white birds with long, gramophone-shaped tails. The tails had an intricate Fibonacci pattern of white and pale orange feathers with an occasional pink feather. Pierre Joris, who in the dream was a renowned physicist, disagreed with me that the tail feathers were similar in purpose to those of a peacock. I told him he was daft, which in reality I would never say to Pierre because he is wonderful (well, if I think he is wonderful maybe he is a bit daft). A girl I knew in high school then tried to prove that Pierre was right, but all of her arguments were circular. I yelled at her, she started to cry, and one of the other students called me Beezlebub. That part was not much different from high school.

Then I dreamt that Reb Livingston and I started a boxcar cafe. We were hell-bent on getting a liquor license.

I dreamt that we were at a party. I was squatting in the living room at the party handling foreign currency. Two W.A.S.P. men in dark grey suits -- we were partygoers new to each other -- told us to keep the money. We removed the bills from a black leather album. Later, one of the W.A.S.P.s stopped me in the hallway. He seemed intent on going to one of the bedrooms, but I had no interest, and my eyes dropped. He said, "You were raped," and I said, "sorry." Then the other W.A.S.P. man appeared in the hall. The two of them lifted me up and carried me into a bedroom while I fought them. One of the men withdrew a needle from a pack and inserted it into my leg at the ankle. I was screaming but my screams were muffled by their hands. I was calling to all coasts, "Michael!" in a low growl. I had never once had a needle in me besides at a doctor's office. What is going to happen to me? Is it a virus? A drug? Then I woke up, glad to be safe but alarmed.