we were somewhere
 
we were somewhere. a
piano bar. NYC. The
Plaza. parking garage.
suburban Super 8.
inside a hospital.
the event was over.
making our way back.
not us. but me guiding.
others. friends.
through the maze of elevators
attempting to follow
the right color carpeting.
not to home,
but to the next thing.
part of the journey entailed
driving over
a broken wooden bridge.
in the piano bar or maybe
audition. a tall weird-looking blondish man
stops singing and recites a poem.
he wants a bride.
the sincerity and naked belief
of his confidence. but
mostly the rhyming.
in the moment that rhymes
with pray I shout something.
a different ending to his
poem, that yes, rhymes.
exiting before folks have
a chance to recognize
what’s just happened.
i find the room. the
party. the shower. the
card game i am supposed
to be at.
not expecting to see you
at the end of all dreams
a dot on the map

I dreamed of a man on a tram who had been involved in a vicious attack that had left him cut and bruised.  Somehow I took him from the tram and into my car in a bid to get him to the police station where he might get help.

I can see him now cowed and bleeding, his dark suit torn.  He was slumped in the back seat of my car, which I managed to parked in the front of the police station in Bridge Road in Richmond.

Then later I dreamed of helping a friend, T, get to the airport.  On the way to the airport she needed to borrow my car, which morphed into a three-seater bike with room on the back for passengers.  T sat in the back with her young daughter, but their weight was excessive and caused the tyres to flatten.  In only a few minutes they needed to get off the bike and walk.

I offered to take them to the airport thinking we had hours to spare. As it turned out they told me had left their run very late.  For an international flight it is best to arrive at the airport at least two hours before the plane’s departure, but they now had only two hours left and still needed to get to their own home from my house to pack.  I did not tell them they would not make it before they pulled away from the curb.

I noticed then on the main road in front of my house two of our cats squabbling over a lump of meat they had found on the edge of the road.  I worried that a car might hit one of them and sure enough it did.

Our cat Mollie’s leg seemed to have been broken presumably after being hit  and I went onto the road to lift her ever so gently and take her inside.  She whimpered in my arms as I held her as carefully as I could so as not to dislodge the bone further.

It was almost impossible to get across the veranda of my house and into the living area where I had planned to telephone for the vet.  Some one had removed several boards from the veranda and it was elevated higher than it is in real life.  I could not get over this obstacle course with a wounded cat in my arms.  Still I tried.

Dream of  Franz

The dream catcher caught me. 

I have the hook in my arm to prove it.

I went to sleep and woke up in Franz’s apt.

Boy was it a mess. He looked the same. Greasy hair,

Clothes all in disrepair.

But I walked over to him and explained that there was no time to lose

I have waited so long anyway and now it is clear.

I laid out my case. 

That the other stuff doesn’t matter

That I certainly was not going to be a poet

And  I would care for him. 

Robert Kelly was there riding a brown horse which

He made kneel so we could all pet it. 

Many others were there some I know Quasha, Kim, Mitch more than I can name.

He seemed to approve the declaration and all that it implied

Franz said to me was that he didn’t want to wait any longer

Transaction accomplished, I admired his view overlooking the ocean,

What a little skin prick can trigger.

March 14, 2011

Also, dreamed a few days ago that Anne Waldman was all in pale pink and with a pink unicorn horn and she had everyone stand back to back and touch their unicorn horns together. I wrote to her the morning after the dream.  She wrote back: "Bhanu, it sounds like some kind of...initiation."

Dream 11 April 2011

My dreams this morning seemed fractured after a fitful night’s sleep.  I remember sitting in a church and the priest in the pulpit decked out in magisterial robes, gold braid and white satin spoke only in Italian.  When the organ blared out the first notes of music it became clear that not only would he speak to us in Italian he would also sing, and sing he did.

Solo in a vibrant tenor’s voice that in places bordered on soprano.  His voice was high and distinctive.  He could sing and he knew it.  Only when he sang did he manage to smile.

After the service was over the tall and thin Italian priest morphed into a woman, an older woman with dyed black hair and pale skin.  Her cheeks were hollowed out with wrinkles and in her ears she wore a stunning pair of earrings, hooped gold with a single pearl fixed in the centre of each hoop.

She stood in the churchyard with one of her grown children and spoke to me about how difficult it had been for her since her husband had died when she was only 72.  Life had not been the same since.  She looked as though she had led a good life with plenty of money and beautiful things around to amuse her and yet she seemed unhappy.

She was like a character from the movies.


Dream 14 April 2011

I am drawn to pick up a shoe I have found under an outside chair in the garden.  It belongs to a woman I know only through blogging.  I have never seen her before but I recognise her by her blog name.  She is tall, thin and glamorous, with an American accent.
‘I like your shoe,’ I say to her, hopeful that she will let me try it on.
‘You can buy it if you like,’ the woman says.  ‘It doesn’t fit me.  It's too tight around my ankles’.

I pick up the shoe and notice a tag with a $5.00 sign attached to the buckle.  The shoe is made of some strange plastic looking leather and is red, bright red, my favourite colour and I am delighted when it fits.  I call it a shoe but it more like a sandal, though the straps are thick and the toes are covered.
‘I’ll buy it’, I sty, ‘but where’s its partner.’

We search the garden for the other shoe.  My blogging friend is nonchalant.  What’s five dollars or a lost shoe to her, a shoe that does not fit anyway, but I am determined to find it.  The  first shoe fits so well.  It is exactly what I have been looking for.

On the veranda atop a wide edged pot plant I see a glimmer of red between the roots of the pot plant.  I pull at it to discover the shoe, which has somehow become overgrown with the roots of this plant such that is entirely covered.  I will have to hack it out of the pot and its bracken prison.

I grab hold of a long knife from the kitchen and a large serving fork, not that either will be any good for the job but I can see no other tools.  Besides I decide I will ask my husband to help me and he will know what to do.

I swing the knife and fork over my head in a dramatic gesture, as if I am preparing to slice someone or something up, aware that I must be careful.  I am like a child with a big stick.  Children swing sticks around their heads with little concern for the consequences, until someone gets hurt.

I wake up before any harm happens, still longing for my shoe.

The first dream (which becomes the dream within a dream):

I'm shooting a movie.  It's completely surprising because I'm the star, picked from nowhere, and my costar, is THE totally hot famous older Scottish actor.  We have to do a scene where we dance close.  We do the scene over and over.  He obsessively fingers the dimples in my lower back and whispers things like "this is where the gold collects."  This is somehow secret from the camera.  This is the best dream ever.

I wake up (still dreaming) to find myself in a resort hotel with tons of guests, very busy.  I'm in a bathing suit, with a big canvas beachbag over my shoulder, in which I carry a painting I did to capture the feeling of the movie dream.  It's my most dear posession.  I guard it carefully.  I see the actor and his wife, they part ways.  He notices that I'm carrying this painting in my bag.  He says it's his, he painted it, that I stole it.  He does not recognize me but we contest the strange mutual artifact (the painting) that links us.

Running, with the painting in my bag, I realize that I am very late for an appointment with my mother, who has set up a resorty thing for us to do: a simultaneous bungee jump out of a helicopter over the ocean.  I'm five minutes late.  It's too late to jump.  And I'm secretly glad that I missed it. 

Dream 4 April 2011

In my dream I woke up and staggered into the hallway.  There in the dim light of early morning I could see that unbeknown to us, someone had come during the night and taken out whole sheets of leadlight from the front door.  All the stained glass that lined the inside and outside panels of the front door and overhead had been taken out and smashed.
I could see out onto the street through the exposed panels.

       ‘The insurance will cover it,’ my husband said, nonplussed.  But I knew we would never be able to replace this leadlight.  An artist had crafted it for us.

As calm as my husband seemed, I was desperate.  I rang the police in a panic.  It was seven am and I began work in an hour.

The police officer on the other end of the telephone line was sympathetic as I tried to report the damage.

Small children whizzed around my knees, two of my own children and their cousin, all around eight to ten years of age.  They played rough games.  Each had a spatula, which they used to dig into the garden and bushes.
           ‘Be careful, ‘I said, between sentences, to the policeman.

My youngest daughter, about three years old,  toddled up to me.  She was naked and draped in a towel following her bath.  The police officer overheard her voice and began to ask questions about my children.  I explained that we had been living in the neighbourhood for years and although we had young children, my husband and I were old.  I offered to go to the police station myself to make the report but then realised I did not want to leave the house unattended, not with an open front door.

I looked again at the shards of glass on the veranda and the strips of wood that had once held the leadlight in place, and were now shattered across the garden.  I feared the culprit might have been someone I knew, an eighteen-year-old woman with whom I had worked some time ago.  I knew she had been angry with me.  Whoever it was, this person had caused thousands of dollars in damage.


*


Dream 6 4 11

The surgeon was to operate on my hand.  I had stayed in hospital and there I met a friend G whom the surgeon was also treating.  He was a gynaecological surgeon and at one time during my stay I overheard him in conversation with a colleague.
           ‘I cannot bear to penetrate the women,’ he said and proceeded to tell his colleague of the trouble he went to in his attempts to reassure his female patients that he conducts his practice purely out of necessity.

I challenged him on this and he raised his eyebrows in dispute.  He seemed uncomfortable that I had overheard him and later when he came to see me to check on the wound he had made on my hand he was alarmed.  It would not stop bleeding.

Then I realised the surgeon himself was ill.

He lay down on the couch fading by the minute and my friend G who had also been ill began to administer to him.

Earlier I had overheard G’s husband express grave concerns for her health and now here she was nursing the surgeon.  I felt jealous.  I wanted to do this job, but the best I could do was assist as her second in command.