I learned of the novel, The Affairs of Others by Amy Grace Loyd, through advertising at Fictionaut.  I clicked on a photo of it, though I tend to read few new novels and reread classics, then read an account of it and an excerpt.  I liked it.  Early the next morning I dreamed just before waking that Amy Grace Loyd sang to me and my publisher her praise of my writing and my way of representing it.  Her language seemed untailored to my situation yet enthusiastic, and my praise of her, though I have not read her novel, was precise and equally enthusiastic.  My publisher, as I am forced to know him after three decades of friendship, stood by me as we withstood the gale of Loyd's approval.

His birthday Thursday marked the day, 16 years ago, I returned to Minnesota from my domestic travels abroad. On Wednesday I dreamed that coffee grounds had spilled on my Buffet. I used my fingertips to wipe the grounds off the black wood. There was another clarinet, a silver one, that belonged to a man not in the room, that was clean of debris. Bob Dylan came to collect me. He was a guest at a hotel. I agreed to follow him; then instead of going to his room, we went to the mirror together. There were green vines growing from pots and copper incense burners and beige and purple sheers billowing like kites. I took on his expressions in the mirror—he stood close behind me and we watched as my face became a kin of his.

I dreamed that I drove to the A.A. meeting in my real car, a silver-gray Infiniti FX35.  I brought prescriptions from the pharmacy in their original wrappers with the instructions tucked inside.  The pharmacy had given me a free prescription as a promotion—something for the vagina, though I’d had no complaint.  It was Tuesday night at St. Luke’s, the church where I was baptized.  I always say that about St. Luke’s—“the church where I was baptized”—as if I owned the place.  Leo Kottke was there, and, for a change, it didn’t make me nervous.  I just slipped through the door.  There was no meeting in session, but people from the meeting and other people, too, were gathered.  It was the Christmas holiday season.  I had not seen Mr. Kottke for something like twelve years.  I had bags, and he had bags.  Besides the bags from the pharmacy, I had my work in satchels.  Leo Kottke had his work in satchels, too.  I fished in one of my satchels for a copy of Country Without a Name to show him.  I thought it was appropriate to start there, with work we had done since we had last seen each other, and he thought it was appropriate, too, and began fishing in his satchels for work to show me.  Country Without a Name and Solzhenitsyn Jukebox are ebooks, however, and no true print copy of them exists; instead, I had booklets made from them on my printer.  I couldn’t find the best version with the illustrations by Daniel Harris, and instead found a prototype with a drawing of Leo Kottke on the cover.  It looked like a doodle I had made of him, as if in my daydreams I had him in mind for my writing.  It embarrassed me that I couldn’t find the real and finished version.  I explained that it was an ebook, and he said he’d seen it because he had downloaded it from the internet.  Then he took my hair and neck in his fingers, and he kissed me.  He kept on kissing me.  It was pleasing and exactly as I’d imagined it would have been had we started kissing in real life back when it now seemed we must both have known we had wanted to.  I wanted to ask him, but knew it was better not to, why he hadn’t written to me long ago.  If it was so easy to kiss each other now, why hadn’t he written to me in response to my letters (sent to his publicist) and kissed me then?  I didn’t ask because the passion of the kissing, also the ease of it, the simple familiarity, brought us into present tense.  I became cooperative with my heart and his.  He had a plan, he said.  “Let’s move all our belongings into the hallway and begin to transfer them to our cars.”  He had so many things with him, not, it seemed, because he was homeless, but because he was camping or on the road performing.  Susan Tepper was there helping with Christmas preparations.  It was easy, as in real life, to get along with her.  Leo went down the hallway.  I assumed he was moving some of his things.  I began organizing my things and thought of the complimentary prescription for vaginal healing.  When he did not return for a while, I went to look for him.  He had gone into the church where a Christmas concert was in session.  He sat in a school desk near the top of the sanctuary.  He looked a little drunk.  He asked for another drink.  He was drinking an almond-colored foamy concoction.  I looked at him as if sorry, and he said, “Don’t feel sorry for me.”  Drinks were being served on the grand piano.  Sam Chauncey was one of the men serving the drinks.  I said, ‘Sam,” and he said, “Ann, ask your question.”  I said, “What is in this drink?  Is it alcohol?”  And Sam said that the almond-colored drink had a low alcohol content, and the cranberry drink did not.  Someone said, “Maybe Leo is not used to drinking any alcohol, and the low alcohol content went directly to his brain.”  I returned to where he sat in the school desk carrying an almond-colored drink.  I served it to him.  Our plan had shifted, but we didn’t mention it.  He seemed to be in his own mind and amused by it.

I woke up this morning having just dreamt that Eileen Myles had invented a board game (or written a book?) called Instant Evolution Is Going to Get You.  Then I dozed and in dozing composed lines as if I were writing the rest of the story, but I can't remember them now.

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

Dreams-in-progress

I walked into a party. Men I'd heard of were there, and more than "heard of," whose intimate veiled thoughts revealed in pages of risky avant garde literature I had read. I was wearing new shoes that were a half size too small. My feet had grown from pounding the pavement looking like someone. The homelessness had broken open in me without interrupting shelteredness.

I had slept with a dry head in a soft bed, alone. It was as if I had always slept that way. I might have resorted to holding a stuffed animal. There was a reason for this celibacy, but it was not religion or disease. It was society. I had exceeded a limit placed on all of us -- how many hands we are to hold before picking the hand we most wish to hold for life. I had thought it was a numeral, but it was a resonance, one that happens early then recurs.

I hit upon it with a musician, a famous man married for decades, a soul already spoken for, enough. I was poor (despite my shelter), and I had learned that "poor" is different from "broke," which didn't apply to all poor people. "Broke” described the noveau poor. And "clarity" I suggested we use when "enough" had been reached.

I dreamt in three dreams that we were at a poetry reading and at two AA meetings. In the second dream of the meetings, the married musician suggested that I read seafaring novels to help the alcoholic I had next met. The alcoholic had rejected AA as brainwashing. Enough, enough, enough, but it wasn't yet enough: clarity in action.

In the earlier dream about the meetings –- the rooms change –- I am bottomless under the table and must cross the room to find pants. My fat shows, fat that wasn’t there when he met me, vantage he would not have seen.

In the dream of the poet, there is a wide sweeping lawn, and we flirt, but it is or is not the same thing, and we have no words for it: “legislation,” “negotiation,” “foundation.” I collide with him on a hill and knock him over. I recircle the hill to see him, but by then he is busy.

Earlier, not ten years of it, I had walked into Keillor's bookstore, and the word "clarity" was written across a banner under the ceiling. Enough, I was thinking, but the furtive position of one seeking clarity or enough, quietly or alone, was barely enough when I couldn't see those brown eyes or pass a guess.

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.

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.