I was stranded at an airport trying to work out which flight I should take next.  I flew then to far north Western Australia in lands inhabited only by aborigines.

My cousin lived here among them and we sat together around a table of friends.  A phone call came through from home, from my friend L.  I thought she had rung to tell me she had cancer but after I managed to decipher the message I realised that she meant it was my husband who had the cancer.  Liver cancer.

Somehow he knew this already.  He sat at the table among friends and his eyes welled with tears.

We needed more information, I said in an effort to reassure him, but I was shattered myself.  How could we cope with this?

                       Jusepe de Ribera: Saint Sébastien

I am in a forest. It resembles the forest on the hike to Sutter Creek in Yosemite, but more tropical. I am sometimes a boy. I know what is going on. I might have had this dream before. I was following someone. I get to a part of the path where I am hiding behind some trees, watching the person I am following (who is a young person, I think a young girl. She is a young girl and I am a young boy and I have a crush on her. I know she is in grave danger and I want to save her. Actually no it is a boy I am watching and I am a young girl.) The boy goes into a big, rusty, metal shed in the forest just off the path. I watch through the window as the boy meets a very tall saint. The saint is wearing a long black robe with a hood, is at least twenty feet tall, and is wearing a medieval mask that doctors wore during the black plague with the long noses. I know that it is fate for the boy to persuade the saint to do something, possibly to persuade him to publish his sainthood - to make his sainthood known because his way of thinking about Christianity is revolutionary. The boy fails to do this, and leaves, but does not go far away. Then a powerful force blows the shed off the ground. The saint turns around to face down the hill. It might be God. It might be an angel. It might be a magical king. The force/person tells the saint that his ideas are too radical and different. The saint tells the force that his ideas about Christianity are totally reasonable and logical, and that there is no reason to feel threatened by them. (Why am I dreaming about Christianity? My grandmother took me to a synagogue in Nairobi.) The spirit demon force goes away. I go into the shed through the window because I am flying. Even though the shed is gone. But I am not flying so much as I am hovering twenty feet above the ground. I tell the saint I agree with him. I fly right up to his face and tell him to take off his mask. The saint's face is handsome. He has sunken cheeks, dark eyebrows and dark eyes. He looks very kind, and probably around 35 years old. I tell him he is beautiful and I kiss him. Then I fly away. I notice a man and a woman sitting a few feet away from the saint. I know that they are going to coach him on his sainthood. But I am concerned now with the boy I am following. He is running away out of the forest, back in the direction he came, because he is trying to get back to the city. (The city might be Berkeley, California.) He is running away because he knows that a flash flood is crashing right behind him, tumbling down the hill. While flying, I follow behind him. I am trying to save him. There are other people running too, but I am only concerned with the boy. Except at this point I might be a boy and the person I am trying to save is a girl. I told the girl to grab onto my feet and I would lift her to safety. She did that, but slipped off because she was unsure of herself. I heard the saint speak to me in my mind, encouraging me to help save the girl again. So I told her to reach for my feet again. She did. This time she got a better grip, but her hands were very sweaty and so were my calves (because we were in a tropical rainforest) so she was still slipping. She told me she was scared she was going to slip off again. So I gently put her down on the side of the path. We decided the best way for me to help her get out of the forest was for her to get on my back. Her cheerleading squad was there, but not wearing uniforms. Her cheerleading squad, which consisted of a bunch of young boys, all stood in position, ready for the girl to mount them like a human pyramid where should would be the top. She kept on repeating the name of whatever this cheerleading trick or move was called. Then her repeating of the name dissolved into her saying “chick chick chick” under her breath. As I write this now I realize that she was mimicking the birds I can hear out my window.

Deserts and Refrigerators of Borneo

I host a party that turns into an all-night sleepover. J. Miller, an old friend, is there. I get to sleep for a little while.

I am on a giant plane (maybe with the same people?) on the way back from somewhere. There is food, but nothing healthy. Many people are sleeping. We are stopping in Borneo. Of the sleeping people, there is one missing: it is a small woman (her name is Mary?). I walk back and forth in the aisles of the plane. Towards the front, I look out the window as it lands in Borneo. I see giant snowy mountains not too far away. Someone says those are the Himalaya. It is captivating to watch them as we taxi. 

We get off the plane and are in a desert with a broad river in it. The river is dirty, and many destitute people sit around. I go in an SUV with Greg J., an old friend, and a woman I don't know and we park at the edge of the river, as far into it as we are able to drive. The front wheels are partially submerged in the river. It is very dry, and we are almost out of water. The woman doesn't want to, but Greg and I decide that a new fridge is the best idea. I go to get it, on foot, which requires climbing up the steep river bank. The sides of the bank have plasticized footholds built in. It is very dry on top, and far to walk where the fridges are. 

Greg and the woman go off somewhere else, to get water for all of us. There is another group of travellers around on top, too.

I meet Greg and the woman again, and they tell me that a fridge is no longer a prudent idea. without admitting it, I realize that there would have been no way to drag a fridge back across the sand by myself. However, I am upset by their decision to send me on what has become a pointless mission. I want to tell Greg that I think he is a liar for changing his mind on what we had decided.

Now, I need the water they have collected, but he put it in some kind of corroded container that looked bad to drink from. All I could do was transfer it to the only thing available- a mini safe-deposit box my grandfather gave me. I had to drink through the keyhole. The woman senses my frustration, and she informs me that I have the wrong attitude. I am still grumpy. On the way back to the car, we see a poor boy with dark skin. The river, which was indeed tidal, has receded, and now the SUV tires are on completely dry ground in the riverbed.

 Painting: "The wall is getting bigger,"  by Driton Hajredini

 

I dreamed that I had woken up abruptly and looked out through my front window to see my husband dressed and ready for the day.  He walked along the street in front of our house and stood to say farewell to a friend. My husband’s arms were laden with suitcases.  Where was he going?  He had not told me that he was leaving.  I tore on my dressing gown and raced into the street. 

No, he was not going anywhere, he said, he was simply bringing in the loads of shopping I had neglected to unpack from my car the day before.  We carried them in together.

After I had unloaded the shopping I found myself driving behind the wheel of what I recognised as my car, only the dashboard seemed different from what I had remembered and I had trouble getting the car into gear.  The clutch kept slipping out.

I cut in front of another car and worried it would hit the back of me but I had left enough room to avoid an accident and then I stopped at the bottom of a hill near my house.  Across the road I could see a group of people, adults and children alike all of them dressed in what looked like red and white horizontally striped jump suits.  Some wore beanies with red horns sewn out of material on their heads.  These were serious football supporters, I reasoned.  They must support the team called the Saints.

It was early morning and they were gathering for breakfast, one of them was my son.  I imagined helping him to pack his bag before this meeting.  I had checked his shoes.  They were new with a price tag of $6.00 attached to the side heel.  So cheap.  I wondered that the shop normally quiet on a Sunday morning could manage so many customers at once.

On the other side of the road there were a few similarly dressed football supporters and one or two in the post office where I stood in a queue waiting my turn.  It seemed to take forever to be served and I found myself annoyed when someone at the other end of the room who had come in after me was served before me.

I became huffy in that understated bodily way when I want it to be known that I am cross, that something is amiss but I do not want to shout it out in front of everyone.

The counter formed a half moon and three women stood behind it each serving customers in turn.  Just below the counter shielded from the over fall on the stretch of shadowed carpet I noticed that someone had dropped their watch.  Then I noticed not one watch but two and three and four.  There was a line of watches along the stretch of ground below the counter’s overhang and I set about collecting them.  I had thought at first that I might keep one for myself – stealing I knew, but who cared – finders keepers.

In the end I decided to hand them all over at the counter when it came my turn.  What could I do with watches such as these?  None seemed particularly valuable, but I wondered that so many people in the one store could stand in the queue and lose their watch.  It was uncanny. 
 

dreamt I was -had been visiting Seneca & Megan, friends from Idaho (& this perhaps where I was visiting), but had by chance met & was conversing with the household of young people that lived "around the corner". They showed me their actualized recipe for marijuana pancakes, something I had in fact dreamed up in Idaho (well, sinsemilia abbelskivers), & when one of those women inquired of a place to practice & record music, I told her of the modish, which is a place here actual transplant friends of mine do same. I literally spelled it out for her, & upon waking realized I was trading the secrets of the waking world for that of my subconscious.

Painting: "Round Midnight" by Debra Hurd

"...and he (Thelonious Monk) came to me, in a dream.  Decked out in divine alligator shoes, a dark green silk suit, bamboo sunglasses, and a cold straw hat, he snuck up behind me as I sat hunched over my stepfather's Steinway upright, looked over my shoulder, and simply mumbled, "You're making the wrong mistakes.""

From Thelonious Monk: The life and Times of an American Original by Robin D. G. Kelley. Thanks to Anne Gorrick for sending it in.

I had a dream last night of which I remember a small portion. I had lost twenty dollars at some sort of art gallery, a small one, that felt more like a bar than a gallery. I knew everyone who worked there. A woman I knew found the twenty dollars but refused to acknowledge she'd done so. I hounded her throughout the course of an evening, but she refused to give in. I went home and then came back the next day.

When I arrived I could see her talking to her friend, another woman, it may have been her lover. She held the twenty furtively near her purse. I heard her say she planned to drop the bill in the stall of the bathroom and that she would let someone else find and return it. I waited while she entered the stall.

There happened to be two stalls, both of which were inside the bar. There were no walls separating the bathroom from the main area of the gallery. I wandered into another room to kill some time. A board meeting seemed to be going on. I was surprised to discover how many of my friends were on the board.

When the woman with my money wandered in to attend the board meeting, I slipped out, fell to my knees and began feeling around with my fingers under the stall doors for the bill. I eventually had to reach in near the toilet to pull it out. Satisfied, I returned to the room where the board meeting had taken place.

It had ended by then and people seemed to be milling about, chatting, having a drink. I sat down at a booth, Charles Bernstein also sat down. He pulled out a stack of xeroxed sheets with large text printed on them All the text seemed to have been cut off at the left margin. Charles began to explain in great detail what the cause of the missing margin happened to be. I got distracted by something else. I I don't remember what. I remember feigning interest, though I had stopped paying attention to his explanation.

This morning this appeared at the top of my Flickr contacts page:

I went to Pearlblossom Highway to see what Mike had to say about In Your Dreams. Last night Mike had a dream about money, and poets. Last night I had a dream about money and poets. (I suppose poets dreaming of poets and money is not to be unexpected.) I have a medallion I've been wearing around my neck daily since Stephanie gave it to me for my birthday in February. It's made of some kind of brass-colored metal, some sort of greenish stone, and it has a big 'S' on it. (You can see it clearly, if mirror reversed, in this picture.) In the dream, I am standing with a group of people, of poets, 'after a reading', but it is in the hallway of the annexed offices of SFMOMA, where I work. Alli wants to sell my necklace to get her money back. She collects a lot of bills from all the others, all the money is stuffed in my pockets and my necklace is laid on the counter. I am so filled with rage, helpless anger, big deep feeling of loss over the loved medallion. I yell at Alli and throw all the money at her, which falls down in front of her eyes and over her head, landing under a big green plant in a white pot on the white counter where my medallion is--I've showered her with money.

On the sheet of paper, the list, double-spaced, one-line
descriptions of each of the six murders of pianists I have
committed. I’m dead. I have confessed to all six.
A movie is to be made of them -- gory, throats slit.
The movie is about to be shown – I don’t
want to see that!

In my dream this morning, I was once again speaking on the phone to the salesman who says things twice. He was explaining to me me how to use my steam mop. He said "It is as easy as cleaning a barn" twice. I can never figure out in these dreams if he he saying things twice because he's reading a script and trying to ...memorize the line or if he likes what he said so much he's trying to remember it for another time.

Excerpt from Joseph Massey's interview of Rae Armantrout:

Massey: Do you have an active dream life? Do you ever lucidly dream? Do you return to the same places/spaces in your dreams?
 

Armantrout: I'm aware of dreaming every night. Some nights I remember a dream vividly, but more often I don't. I know that my dreams are full of chatter, full of voices. From what I read, I don't think that's necessarily true of everyone's dreams. Dreams fascinate me because in a sense they are little plays we make up for ourselves. We're the directors and the audience—and we're a good audience too because we almost always suspend disbelief.

In terms of lucid dreaming, I seem to have some control over my dreams. For instance, I don't really ever have nightmares. If a dream starts to get too disturbing, I generally wake up before anything too bad happens. Or sometimes the scary parts will be put at a distance somehow, happening to a character who doesn't appear to be me, for instance.

Before I was diagnosed with cancer, I had a number of sad or ominous dreams. I recorded some of them in Versed. Examples would be the 4th section of "Later" and the last part of "Worth While." If you read those sections now, I think you can see that I was giving myself a warning.

Painting: "Pig" by Norma Wilson

I'm very pregnant, overdue. My doctor put some kind second-skin, fabricy material over my stomach to speed up labor. I'm out with a bunch of people who are annoyed that they may have to drive me to the hospital. Chris is out-of-town on business. I call him up and tell him it's time. Then I'm in a parking garage, flagging down a man to drive me to the hospital. He seems put out, but agrees. I think he's worried about me yucking up his sports car. I get to the hospital and Chris is there waiting for me in the birthing room. I walk down the hall to my recovery suite. I must have paid extra, it's really nice, round-the-clock care. My uncle is there waiting for me, which is odd, but a nice gesture. I go to the bathroom to take off the second skin and to see if my water broke. Nurses and a toddler keep coming in, opening doors, disturbing my privacy. I get really frustrated. Someone from my suite yells that a large box of chocolates just arrived. I yell back that I'm kind of busy right now and would they please just leave it. A nurse has a band-aid. I ask what is it for--she says I have a little pig bite on my neck. I'm offended and insist that I certainly do not have a little pig bite on my neck.

Obras Escogidas by Kcho, Walker Art Center

I have been offered a place in a resort designed for people recovering from a variety of non-specific ailments.  Mine has something to do with my legs.  I have trouble walking.  The organisers offer me a special walking frame.  I use it warily.   

In the beginning we are able to work together well, we, the group participants and organisers, but as the days pass more and more people come to occupy the grounds and buildings of this camp.  In time it is so crowded it reminds me of what it is like to share the local swimming pool in summertime on the hottest of days.  There is scarcely room to move, let alone to play. 

In the dream my husband, my daughters and my young son join me.  My son is still in nappies.  He wears a white jump suit when I first see him at the camp and I realise he has grown since the last time I saw him.  The jump suit is one of his sisters’ cast offs, a little old fashioned and not suitable for a growing boy.  His nappy is full and I want to change it.  I go to change it but somehow someone distracts me and before I know it I have lost sight of my son.  

  

I scoot along under the power of my walking frame knowing that I am not using it, as I should, and anxious that one of the organisers will tell me off.  I realise soon this is unlikely.  There is no supervision anymore at this camp.  There are simply too many participants to manage.  There are children everywhere.  They play in underground caves where the earth has been cratered to form burrows.  Palm trees grow underground, reaching for sunlight through holes in the earth’s surface. 

I continue to look for my son whose name I remember is Norman.  I do not like this name.  I did not choose it.  What could have possessed my husband to choose such a name?  I cannot bring myself to call out my son’s name in public.   

It is a wonder that any parent can supervise a child in this place.  Chaos reigns. 

Last night I had two vivid dreams. The first dream involved me going to teach a student and I drove down a long hill and my brakes went out and I drove into the student's living room. His father yelled at me. Later during the lesson I had to ask the father to turn the television down because it was disrupting us. That was my alarm clock. I hit the snooze button and the next dream was me with a bolt of pink flannel in a cowgirl design. I was wrapping records vinyl records at my job. The flannel was the wrapping paper. I was intent on making them beautiful when a man came along and decided to help. He couldn't get the flannel on neatly so he covered his record in pink bubble wrap. Then he wrote a rather long note and taped it to the mess and told me the note was a love letter to a woman. I took the record from him neatly wrapped it in pink cowgirl flannel scrunched up the letter and threw it on the floor.

I may have been dreaming AWP dreams last night as I had two distinct dreams with two distinct poets. The first dream was fairytale dark and lovely. Ana Carrete and I had big push brooms and we were sweeping the longest dock ever. The dock stretched out over the ocean. It was night and warm maybe summer and we were whispering and laughing as we swept. The next dream was with Laura Gamache who actually is at AWP. There were many women at Laura's house women inside women outside standing around talking the way friendly nice intelligent socially adept people do at parties and there some talk of having to join I had to join a club or a sorority to be part of the party and Laura had a scroll out a long scroll that I had to sign and I wanted to sign it I wanted to be part of it all but the pen kept slipping out of my hand or it would skitter off the page when I tried to write my name and Laura kept telling me very patiently to take it slow and I'd be okay but I knew I'd never be okay that I'd never be part of the party. This dream is not nearly as myterious as sweeping an immense dock in the ocean because it's pretty much how it goes for me. Every day. They were both good dreams and I blame the dreaming of poets on my brilliant editor Reb Livingston who started it.

I was with my friend who died three months ago in January. We were walking on a street beside the river, through a section of old abandoned warehouses. We came to a concrete ramp framed by a metal rail and followed it up to the back door of one of the buildings. He opened the door and we went inside. There was another door just a few feet in, guarded by a tough-looking young man who knew at a glance that we were both old enough to enter. He opened that door for us, and we walked down a long, narrow, carpeted hallway. At the end of the hall, we turned right and entered a dimly lit bar. We found an unoccupied table and sat down. A man I assumed was the proprietor, and who bore a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, was sitting behind a small desk in the corner. He got up, came to our table, and asked us what we wanted. My friend said, “Two premium lagers.” The man bowed, went back to his desk, opened one of the drawers, and then returned with two clear, flexible, partially deflated rubber balls with short red straws in them. We could see the liquid sloshing around inside. My friend’s straw was sticking up; mine was folded down and stuck to the surface of the container. He took a sip from his, frowned, then offered it to me. Knowing he was dead, I was reluctant to drink from the same straw. He immediately understood and helped me free my straw instead. I took a drink. The beer was weak and warm. “This really isn’t what I had in mind,” my friend said. “Me, either,” I replied. We put down our beers and left. But the way out was not the way in. And so it always is, I thought. So it always is.

I watch video footage of a man who slices pieces off a woman’s face.  She stands impassive while blood pours from her wounds.  The knife is sharp and the man relentless.  I wake up.

 

Later asleep again I am in a hospital bed side by side with another woman, also in bed.  We are both pregnant and both expecting that our babies will soon be born.

 

Nearby I can see the white lump of something that looks like the abandoned shell of a cuttlefish.  It is all that remains of my previous pregnancy.

      ‘I’m going to keep this as a reminder,’ I say to the woman in the bed beside me.  Somehow I believe that I have lost my first baby through someone else’s negligence and I feel sad and angry at the same time.

Now I am worried about this next baby. Under the cover of the blankets my pregnancy lump looks small compared to that of my neighbour.  I have not yet dared to look at my swollen belly.  When I finally get the courage to do so I see a fully formed baby under a thin gladwrap-like membrane.  The baby curls around my torso ready to be born.

My mother comes to visit and admires the baby.

      ‘Why are her nostrils squished like that?’ she asks.

      ‘She hasn’t learned how to breathe on her own yet,’ I tell my mother.

 

It is only a short matter of time before my baby will be born.  I am impatient.  I notice two small tears in the membrane.  Will this rupture speed up the birth?  Will it endanger my baby? 

 

The alarm goes off and again I wake up. 

He is looking at a huge iron skillet sitting on a fire outdoors. In the skillet is a lot of melted butter and a tiny naked man. The man is slipping and sliding in the butter. He does not appear to be cooking. He's not red or brown. He's a tiny little pink naked man in a huge skillet sitting on a fire.
 

He is hanging on a cross being crucified like Jesus, only he doesn't die. Another man is hanging there beside him. The dream switches to a locker room where the two naked men are showering, washing the blood off them.

Arbitrary Numbers  

We could have been in Russia, queues everywhere, including on the main road where my car had been stopped; one in a long line of cars at a roadblock.  A woman in grey uniform spoke with each driver, one after the other, before waving us on.  Some handed her money before driving off, others not. 

I knew that this woman was collecting special taxes and that whether or not I would have to pay was arbitrary.  It had something to do with the way she would interpret certain numbers on my driver’s licence.  To the observer these numbers represented a code that each licence holder in the queue of licence holders owned.  These numbers had most likely been allocated in order of receipt of licence, but this uniformed woman at the roadblock had her own idiosyncratic interpretation of those numbers and she did not share this secret knowledge with anyone.  It seemed she used it as the basis for her decision as to who should pay and how much.   

I figured I could afford an additional $200.00 but was hopeful that she would wave me on because I had already paid several hundreds into a special tax fund from which the government could draw if necessary.   

I looked down at the numbers on my licence and tried to decipher some meaning from them but I could not fathom what that meaning might be.  To me they stayed the same – a seemingly random bunch of numbers.

 

My turn in the queue moved closer. 

Good Friday night dream.

 

Our back yard has become a resort, a holiday complex complete with artificially constructed hills, ponds and the occasional piece of play equipment.  Our house itself is also part of the holiday resort. We are inside the kitchen looking out into the garden when my husband notices that the left over pizza from the evening before is now covered in weevils, white squishy bugs.  I have seen the type before but never in such quantities.  They magnify before our eyes and large groups of them hang together in fist-sized balls teeming with life.

   

My daughters stand around disgusted and somehow, as usual, it falls to me to tidy them up.  I take a washcloth and begin to wipe them away and into a large rubbish bin bag into which I have already thrown the remaining pizza.  The bag moves under my hands.  Even I find the job disgusting especially as everywhere I look these maggoty bugs seem to be proliferating even as I try to remove them.

   

I find a pair of rubber gloves under the sink with the intention of being less timid in my clean up.  If I do not have to feel the bugs directly on my skin I will be able to pick up hunks of them and throw them into the garbage bag.

 

I have not completed the job when we all go outside for some unspoken reason.  Members of my family are scattered throughout the garden when I look towards the side entrance gate and notice a man who is naked.

 

Who is he?  What is he doing here?  I want to direct my husband’s attention to this stranger, when the man clutching his trousers around his belly walks into the centre of the garden where someone has set an old doorless car that is now used as a cubby.  Inside the cubby house I can see there is another man and a woman, both of them naked.  The first man comes along and helps the woman to dress.  The men dress themselves.  No one speaks to them, but we are all aware of their presence.  The three then walk out together and as they are leaving I notice one of the men hold hands with the other man and I realise both that they are gay and that one of the men is my brother-in-law.

      ‘I didn’t know your brother was gay?’ I say to my husband.

      ‘Nor did I’.  As so often happens to conversations in dreams this one ends here.

 

We are back inside the house in a bedroom, which I now share with some of my children and a couple of elderly women from South Africa.  The women are genteel, ladies of wealth, ladies from a bygone era, who find it hard to be part of this world.  They lie on top of their beds trying to rest but I am conscious that we, my children and I, might be making too much noise.

 

I try to draw the blinds but one of them sticks and the elderly woman whose window is nearest the sticking blind shows me a trick to dislodge it.  She insists we not try to be so silent.

 

We are on the downhill run to dinner.  I find myself fossicking through a large props cupboard that belongs to my children’s school.  It is filled with remnants of performances from years ago and I find myself reminiscing over certain items.  I understand that I can keep things from this cupboard and try to sort out what is of value and what not.

 

I include as many of my children as will participate in sorting through, including my youngest, a boy, a toddler who sits on the top rung of the cupboard, pinned in against my body to stop him from falling.  When he is ready to get down I call out to a young man passing by to take him from me.  I am perched on top of a ladder and it is an effort to pass the heavy toddler over to this tall young man, but we succeed and I am pleased to see this man and his girlfriend take an interest in my son.  Babies and small children always manage to bring strangers together.

 

I open a small tin of what I think to be beads and trinkets.  M looks over my shoulder.  She stands there with her husband, both of whom I have not seen for twenty years.

      ‘They look as though they’re alive,’ M says of the trinkets inside my tin.

 

I see these trinkets as sparkling insects in the colours of a Christmas beetle, a shining luminescence of colours, blues, green and gold.  I am relieved when I realise the trinkets are not in fact alive.  They are painted seeds from some berry tree and held together in a row with twine.

 

I wonder then whether all the weevils from this morning’s pizza have dispersed.  If not, I still have cleaning to do.

In my dream I have come home for Christmas.  Home is a fifties style kitchen complete with laminated topped table and green tiles on the floor.  My mother sits at the table.  She is dressed in the type of skirt and blouse she might have worn when she was aged in her forties.  She pours tea from a large pressed metal teapot.

 

Although this woman pouring tea is my mother she does not have my mother’s accent.  This woman has an Australian accent and in this sense she reminds me of my husband’s mother.   

He sits beside me at the table and like me he is a peripheral visitor to this household.  We have come unexpectedly and although we are made welcome it is clear we are not central.  A version of my sister, the one immediately below me in age, sits at the other end of the table alongside her husband and they are each opening presents.  They have also handed small parcels over to my mother and her second husband, who now lives with my mother in the dream.

 

The presents are small tokens, nothing of value, some of it junk, but they ooh and aah over each gift as though it is the one thing they have wanted all their lives.  Somehow although we have no gifts to exchange, my husband and I feel comfortable enough about being here to watch the gift-giving scene between these others.

 

There is an impoverished feel to this kitchen, a familiar feel and I know I do not want to linger long.  I sense that my husband would prefer that we leave.  I get up to go and can tell that my mother would like to think that I am leaving only because my husband wants to go, not because I want to go.  I am content to let my mother think this.  Somehow it is less painful.  I do not want to hurt her feelings even as I sense that mine have been hurt so many times over that I am now impervious to pain.   We say our goodbyes. 

I set off down the sidewalk in a warm, light rain. I had no umbrella. The rain felt good on my face. The sidewalk ended at a busy road. Across the road was a flooded field. Before my eyes, there materialized a rising river. To the west lay higher ground. To the east, the road followed a downward slope. The river crashed onto the pavement in great waves. I thought it might alter the course of the road. A young couple approached. The husband was much taller than his wife. As if we’d known each other all our lives, he said, “I hear there’s trouble by the gates.” And I replied, “Yes, in that distant realm.”

I was in the lobby of a classroom building on a college campus.  The room was dim, as the windowed wall stood in the shadow of the treeline.  It was dark enough to obscure the print on the various flyers taped to the walls.  Animals started streaming in from outside, black bear, horse, polar bear, cow, so many large bodies that I felt a wave of claustrophobia.  I pushed my way past them, briefly getting stuck between the two sets of doors with the polar bear (she was too confused to find her way in).  Finding safety outside, I saw my girlfriend crossing the lawn towards me.  Her Newfoundland, Giovanna, was still inside.  I went back, squeezed past the polar bear and returned to the lobby.  I was shocked to find the black bear in flagrante dilecto, having mistaken Gigi for a bear.  The poor dog already has a bad uterus, so I pushed him off to protect her weak reproductive organs.  Luckily he hadn't fully begun, but when I pushed him off I saw evidence of his preparedness.  I herded the horse, cow, and Giovanna out of the building, past the polar bear still stuck in the doors.  The livestock fled across the lawn, and my girlfriend and I crossed the campus to the cafe and ordered blueberry buckwheat pancakes from a booth in the back.  The room consisted of a perimeter of booths around a horseshoe bar, with an open kitchen in the center.  This building, too, relied on natural light.  Its windows were set in the same direction as the first building, but it overlooked the meadow and took in enough light for a pleasant breakfast.

"Dreaming Something Else" by Lyn Hejinian, in Bob Perelman feature, Jacket 39.

I dream that Peter and I are in our kitchen, getting ready to go to work.  He's wearing a burgundy colored sweatshirt and black jeans.  Everything is like it is every morning, the rustle of breakfast and coffee.  I notice that someone else walks into the room.  It's an exact copy of Peter, except he's wearing a bright blue shirt.  I barely notice for a while.  And then I can't figure it out.  We're always two, but now we're two plus a photocopy.  As I try to uncomfortably wrap my mind around the fact that I've now got two husbands, I also try to keep straight which one is the "real" one - probably the first one?  I realize that if I can just find my copy of Kathleen Fraser's When New Time Folds Up, that I'll be able to figure this out.  Then I wake up.

Last night I dreamed Bach not the man but his music in my head which happens whenever I am practicing something and has always happened ever since I was a child -- dream learning.

There was a box that I was supposed to handle, but I knew something was amiss. I also had a strong feeling that I'd "be next" which was sort of terrifying. I asked a man to open the box because I had my suspicions. I was correct! The alien inside the box was not dead. Not only was he still alive, but his flesh had been eaten off by bugs and critters--he was writhing terribly. It was not too late to save him. He had been put in that box by another alien, but since we just exposed the activities of this 2nd evil alien, he would be dealt with and I no longer had to worry about being put in a similar flesh eating box. BUT, when the man opened the box he released all the flesh eating bugs and critters (in my bedroom!), one was a large, black scorpion. I knew I was going to have to get some bug spray to take care of this problem. Then I gave a poetry reading, then I tried to find matching knee high stockings and then I came back to the house and found Chris asleep in the bathtub. I woke and told him about the bugs, he already knew, they were in the living room. I told him about the scorpion, although at first I said "scarab," we both corrected my mistake at the same time. It was not a scarab, it was a scorpion and yes, Chris was aware of that too.

I went into a gallery. There was an installation that consisted of very realistic, life-sized sculptures of people who were half melted into the floor. Large puddles surrounded each half melted person. They were sticking up at odd angles.

I was peddling a one-speed bicycle seventy miles an hour on a freeway with my wife and grandson aboard. We had one piece of luggage strapped to the frame: a leather saddlebag. Confused by the signs, I took the wrong exit and went up a hill. We got off in a flat graveled area surrounded by leafy trees. There were no cars or bicycles in sight. Several people were milling around, not at all impressed by how we’d arrived. Up ahead, on higher ground, there was a large round concrete tank. Hovering just above it was an empty wooden rocking chair, turning slowly in the breeze.

This weekend I had two dreams of beautiful, tranquil places. In one I had just arrived (Brussels) and in another the pilot of my plane flew low to show the passengers a new place with large, newly-blooming flowers and a pristine beach.

Last night I dreamed of a huge room full of very young Asian girls, 3 or 4 years old, hundreds of them, all in blue dresses, and they were all playing violins and these jellyfish beings floated out of the their violins and flowed toward me and the air was blue. The music was beautiful and I think the jellyfish were trying to tell me something about music but I couldn't understand because my hair had grown long, to my feet, and was wrapping itself around my neck like we were all underwater. This is the second dream I've had where god-like creatures came out of musical instruments and tried to speak to me. It is common for me to dream the color blue in this, the mud season.

I dreamed I had come off the train in a small town somewhere in America, Mexico perhaps, judging by the clothes the people wore – big hats, lots of religious iconography in the streets, sacred hearts and blessed virgins everywhere.  It must have been a weekend at least or perhaps a holiday.  People congregated in bars at outside tables and on the street itself.  
I said good-bye to my husband who had travelled with me on the train.  He had errands to run and we planned to meet up after an hour or two.  I intended to wander and explore alone.  

I left the station and walked down to a small shopping area in the centre of town.  I thought at first that I had lost my shoes.  At one point I looked downward and realised I was barefoot.  I must have left my shoes behind.  I could not understand that I had taken off my shoes and left them behind but the evidence of my bare feet was incontrovertible.  How else could I lose my shoes.

I walked around in circles looking for them.  There were many different abandoned shoes scattered across the streets, in pairs and singles.  Most resembled the recycled variety of sandal shoe we had bought for my daughter for Christmas from American Apparel – the shoes that had twice fallen apart and that I had needed to return twice before we finally collected a pair that have lasted for more than one wear.  

No sooner had I found my shoes than I discovered I had left my handbag somewhere and it was gone too, stolen I feared, and worst of all, worse than the money stolen would be the dreadful job of having to cancel and then re-order my credit card and licence and other bank cards.  

I walked alongside a young couple with American accents.  She told me she was about to go off to pray.  He, on the other hand, was not interested in prayer.  He had jobs to do.  The woman scolded me for my carelessness when I told her about my lost handbag.  They were gone before they had even offered to help me to look for it.  To them I seemed a lost cause, a hopeless case.  I could see it in their eyes.  
Next thing, I saw my handbag hanging off my arm.  It must have been there all along.  I had simply not recognised I was carrying it, in much the way I sometimes forget that my glasses, the ones I think I have lost, are sitting there on top of my head.  

My handbag however had changed shape.  It was larger than it used to be and when I looked inside I saw that the original handbag, my real handbag, was fitted snugly inside.  I could not bring myself to take a look to check that my wallet had not been stolen.  I still suspected foul play and I needed a quiet space alone to contemplate my losses.

I dreamed I watered my cactus. I dreamed a long scrolled piece of paper upon which my sins and good deeds were being accounted for were being shaded in by a lead pencil. The sins were shaded over and over until they were a black ribbon and the good deeds were erasing the black.

I was strapped to a chair, wearing a sort of Lone Ranger mask with wires attached to the throats of people sitting around me. One by one these people were injected with a truth serum that compelled them to express their deepest fears. Their lips moved, but their words came out of my mouth, and I felt their fears as if they were my own.

And then I found myself in France, walking down an esplanade with a pretty, self-contained Dutch girl, a taciturn Spaniard, and a pudgy, swarthy, curly-haired young man who spoke both French and English fluently. This last handed me a pair of underwear like blue terrycloth Speedos. "Ceci sont de rigueurs pour les hommes en France," he said. Apparently my companions were expecting me to drop my pants and don these outré Gallic briefs right in front of them. I tried to explain that I don't wear underwear--that, comme beaucoup des types Américains, I schlepp around in jeans much of the time, allowing my junk to flounce untrammeled inside them--but the French equivalents of some of these words escaped me, so I appealed to the pudgy one for help. He'd been my go-to guy whenever my French had failed me. On this occasion, however, he refused to oblige. He just regarded me with cool amusement as I mumbled, "Mon membre... les bijoux de ma famille..."

The End of Our World

We had heard the warnings: a nuclear explosion and death imminent. We needed to get to a safe space. People congregated in the school hall at the end of a corridor. I hoped my children were among them. I could not be certain. I was busy chasing up a couple of other children, two boys, one of whom insisted on climbing up a tower to have a look out and to help fix a technological fault. I called up to him to hurry.

People were racing along corridors to get to the safe place. We had only minutes to spare. A person on a loudspeaker counted down the seconds. All this in slow motion and I had still not reached the safe place.

Somehow the explosion went off and I found myself behind the closed doors of the school hall while I noticed my sister come racing down still outside. Could we let her in or would we be required to keep the doors sealed from then on through fear of radioactivity?

We opened the doors. I went looking for my children in this crowded building, out the back way towards the toilets where I met my husband. He and I were alone now in a sealed off toilet block, alone while the rest of the world was dying. We knew it was only a matter of time before we too would die. We sat on the floor and leaned against the wall. We were reconciled, tranquil even. At one stage I got up again and peeked through the door into the open courtyard and grey wafts of radioactive smoke full of heat poured in. I shut the door instantly and sat down again. We knew we would be unconscious before we felt any pain, before the heat consumed us. This was a relief. My husband was already drifting off.

Did we say our goodbyes? I knew we were soon to die but still I could not believe it. I wanted to see my children at least one last time assuming they were still alive.

I had taken off my shoes. I slipped them back on with the thought I will die wearing shoes. Then I decided to get up again. I was wide-awake. I went out a different door this time and was surprised that the grey breeze was not so powerful now. There was also a wind that seemed to blow the radioactive fog away.

I ran along the corridor into another building. Clusters of people milled around talking to one another. One person had even prepared a meal. He sat at a low table knife and fork in hand. It might be a good idea to eat, I thought. Who knows soon there would be food shortages.

One couple held a baby. I thought of my grandson. Where were they, my soon to be married daughter, her partner and their son? Where were my other daughters? I did not feel distressed only a vague sense of resignation as if I had accepted our fate, whatever our fate would bring. I woke up trying to locate each of my children.

In this dream I am back in my hometown of Marlboro, NY at my grandmother’s house. Besides my grandmother and I, there are several other people at her house and we are expecting someone else to arrive momentarily. While we are waiting I decide to take a walk to the center of the village. It is winter, with a fresh snowfall on the ground. A large storm has passed through and there are about two feet of snow. None of the streets have been plowed, and no one else is out and about. As I approach the small grocery store on Western Avenue I notice that my dog is not with me and grow concerned. I turn around and head back toward the house, all the while calling for the dog, not knowing where she is. As I pass one house a man comes out on his porch and invites me in. There is a wood stove in his living room and near it a stack of firewood in a rack that he has built. At this moment a knock comes on the door, and the homeowner lets in another man, a fire inspector who says that the wood rack is not up to code. Apparently there is additional work that needs to be done in the bathroom, but what the connection is to the wood rack is puzzling. I laugh and tell the owner that he should have installed an outhouse. Next, I leave and continue walking toward my grandmother’s house. A snowplow has come through, making walking on the streets much easier. I’m still concerned about my missing dog, but when I arrive back at grandma’s I see she (the dog) is on the enclosed porch playing with another dog. At my approach she excitedly pees near the door and I tell my grandmother that I will wash it out the door with a teapot of hot water. As I go to fetch it, grandma tells me to get another pot of cool water to fill the birdbath in the front yard. As I am washing the porch I glance inside the house and see several people seated in the living room. There are also several dogs, and I count them. There are eight, of various breeds and sizes. Among them are a Scotch Terrier, an Irish Setter and a large brown dog of unknown breed. Thyere are also two cats in the room. I go inside and begin a conversation with a young woman - my cousin’s girlfriend. She asks me who is going to be performing at a local music venue. I tell her that rather than asking that question she should decide who she wanted to see in concert and contact that band’s management office in Woodstock to find out where they would be playing. At this point I awaken and the dream is over.

My father had everyone’s pay in a flat leather case, but he had decided that he was going to give the case to a courier for delivery. I tried to convince him that the courier would steal the money. Although there was doubt in his expression, he insisted that wouldn’t happen. Still hoping to persuade him, I followed him through the back entrance into a gloomy institutional kitchen. No one was around. We passed through a set of swinging doors with round windows in them. Suddenly there was about twenty feet of space between us. He met and whispered briefly with a very tall man in a suit. Then I followed him back outside. We were standing in the shade of huge buildings held up by granite columns. I tried again to tell him that the money would be stolen and that he would be held responsible. But he seemed powerless, as if the decision were now out of his hands. About that time, we were joined by the courier. She was about thirty-five, and clearly someone that shouldn’t be trusted. My father handed her the case. Once again, a large space opened between us, and I tried to guess which route she would take away from the buildings. There were several narrow passageways that led directly to the road, but she surprised me by taking the long way around. In no time at all, she had run on ahead of me, and was rounding the base of a mountain. I started to run after her, knowing full well that when I try to run in dreams I often have trouble gaining traction, or I run on my hands... so I stopped running and stood up to take a deep breath, trying to remember how to run properly — and then I was off again... until I was distracted by some cucumber plants alongside the road... the cucumbers were ripe, and if no one picked them they would be wasted... my father loved cucumbers... and then I remembered he was no longer alive. I felt one. It was soft. On closer examination, I found something wrong with all of them. I looked up in time to see the woman disappear as she followed the bend in the road.

I went to some foreign country with a group of friends. Maybe it was Hungary or Czech Republic, not sure. Maybe Russia? We had to take a train from some place to some other place. Along the way I was concerned about the quality or the status of my passport. I also grew concerned that I seemed to be the only person trying to keep track of what time it was, what time we had to be anywhere, or get back. At some point Cara Benson was there, and I think we were visiting Athena Stylos in a house she either owned or was borrowing. I think she owned it because at some point I was climbing up this very, very long, spiraling, meandering hand-made staircase, that I’m pretty sure she put together. It felt extremely rickety but everyone assured me it was strong nonetheless. The staircase was something I felt a need to replicate somehow, either drawing, or filming. It was like a Jan Svankmajer creation. Cobbled together, very comical, but also strangely beautiful (in its uniqueness and that it was made at all). It didn’t ascend at a consistent pitch, but dipped up and down in places. The pitch was mostly shallow, too, so that crawling/climbing along on it was not so much going up or down anywhere as all around a room. But also up. Then we were getting ready to go to bed (I think) and I think maybe I felt funny about not knowing where to sleep. Maybe Mackenzie Carrignan was there too? I think so. I think it was all poets from Dusie, a couple of dude poets as well. The whole of it was darkly lit, and everything felt old and worn. The next day we were getting back on our way, maybe to go home. We stopped in a café for a quick breakfast. Several people had already sat down around a wooden bar and were drinking some kind of café au lait or lattes or cappuccino. These were in small-ish clear glass cups and mugs, very brown…the foamed milk on top was also brown It looked all sweet and sticky. Foamy brown sugar. I sat down next to someone, worried (again) I was taking someone’s spot but sort of not caring because I felt an urgency to move on and to get us going so we wouldn’t be late for our train. Someone came out of the bathroom to re-join us, and then I woke up.

I woke up from a dream in which I had a license plate that said ERIS -- which I thought in the dream meant YOU ARE, but realized upon waking that it means YOU WILL BE, or else it could be the Greek goddess of strife.

This morning I dreamed that I watched a policeman in an unmarked car pull over a woman driver directly in front of my house. The woman stood at the window of the police car and talked down to the policeman through his open window, the reverse of what normally happens when a person who has been stopped sits in their car and waits for the police to come to their car window to address them.

‘You provoked me with your driving,’ the woman said’. The policeman listened and then they were both outside of their cars face to face on the nature strip. The policeman started to write out a ticket. I could not hear their conversation now but I watched as the woman, aged somewhere in her mid thirties grew visibly upset.

Whatever she had been accused of doing seemed to come as a surprise to her and although I could see that the policeman’s manner had softened in his approach to her, he continued to write out a ticket. He went back to his car and I went over to the woman who was now sobbing to the point of breakdown.

‘He says I was going at 33 kilometres an hour, three kilometres over the limit. If ever there was such nitpicking.’ She wiped her eyes with her hand. What’s more, they say I have a blood alcohol reading. How can I?’

The policeman returned with a tester and the woman blew into its nozzle.

‘I haven’t had a drink since last night,’ she said, and I hoped for her that she did not drink so much the night before that it might still register in her blood. Clearly it did not because the policeman told her she could go after he handed her a parking ticket.

Next I was in a police car with three male policeman, rollicking chaps who enjoyed one another’s company. Somehow I had lost my handbag and they were taking me to the police station to sort it out. I had gone earlier to a shop and put my handbag and my daughter’s handbag down on the floor. I stood and watched a couple go through a dance routine. The girl was young, maybe only eighteen or so and dressed like a hillbilly, the man was almost double her size and perhaps three times her age.

They came together in a sort of country style dance, back and forth. It was not clear who was teaching whom to dance. I turned away to look for something to buy and when I looked back my handbag had been completely emptied of its contents along with that of my daughter.

The man owned up to it at the young woman’s prompting and he gave me back my belongings. Some how it seemed he would only rob those he did not know and for some reason he considered me to be an acquaintance.

Was I going to the police station to report him? I do not know. My memory of the dream peters off here.

Last night I dreamed a parade of flying cars. My son's 57 Chevy was in the middle of the front row of cars. I thought it's about time and ran outside to see if my little Civic would fly and sure enough I turned the ignition and my car floated up above my roof.

Last night I dreamed I was watching soldiers in the desert who were surrounded by a large thick Plexiglas cage. I was on the outside of the cage banging on it with both my hands and shouting. They could neither hear nor see me. I finally gave up and sat down in the sand. I was naked and I knew I was dreaming as I was dreaming.

I was determined to dream & I did, in the hope that the time spent dreaming would free me but fearful that the trap might spring & would drag me still further down. There remained the bed to hold us up, to sustain us for the troubled days ahead. “You” was the name of someone but she used another name. I was exposed to it as well, angry enough to cut the dream short but willing to pursue it where it led. A friend attempted to be rational, yet the attempt itself was the cause of his depression & what made it so hard to bear. Here was a phenomenon no doubt but more than that a constant urge. Apart from being gracious the opportunity arose to tip our hand – much less our hats. A thousand thousand pardons. Is your brother in that group of young men leaning against a wall as nonchalant as in a photograph from years ago but unapproachable? A trip to somewhere – Italy, Mexico, I can’t remember—but did that make the wonder less extreme?

We were watching a movie in which three young men were featured – a young Jew & two others. A discussion followed after a failed phone call to Isaac Bashevis Singer, to see if we could meet him at his new apartment on the Lower East Side. I tried to point out to the others that the film’s director cast a blond-haired actor as his medieval Jew (Jews are not supposed to be blond), but the others wouldn’t let me finish my sentence. Feeling on edge I walked outside & smoked a cigarette.

I was on a train soon after, heading for Bremerhaven I thought, but I couldn’t remember at which station I should exit. I checked the directions I had written down, and they said Convent Avenue. But I seemed to have been traveling too long. I must have passed it, I thought, and I got off at the next station, which was clearly not what I wanted. I checked a large map on the wall opposite the track but Convent Avenue wasn’t on it. Was it still ahead or had I already passed it? I knew I had to ask someone, but the platform had already emptied out.

The streets around our old apartment house were covered with a dark green moss – something uncanny, that if I touched it, would burn or paralyze my fingers. I knew that the river was only a few blocks away & that if I reached it, there would be a chance of cleansing. But the child at my side – not Matthew but a dark-faced girl I didn’t recognize – kept pulling in the opposite direction. I felt that this was wrong, but I could do nothing else but follow.

I was watching a movie on or by Yosano Akiko, when people started rushing out & others rushing in, & I remembered that I’d forgotten the paper I was going to deliver at the poetry conference of which this was a part, along with an expert in Italian literature, a little swarthy man who was only now arriving.

Startled by the noise the old woman looked up & saw: the television screen was black & the basket on top of it was empty. She said: I know who did it, that young girl did it. Then she began to scream, or I did as a warning, & the women servants came running, & the household pets came running. And one of us kept screaming till I woke up.

In Germany again, with Ammiel or someone who looks like Ammiel, going to hear & meet an Arab poet. We are traveling by trolley to check out the performance space, and once we find it, we go to a street café around the corner to get a bite to eat. After we’ve ordered I realize suddenly that I not only don’t have money for the meal but nothing for the reading & the reader. I decide to go back home and leave, making my way back to a main street, where I ask directions in German and someone points me to a wide boulevard, where a trolley or a bus should be running. But when I get there I find that the road is under construction and have to make my way down a steep ploughed-up ditch in order to cross it. Trying to find the bus, trying to remember the number of the building for the reading, to which I must return. It’s number 403! – I’m almost sure of it – but I decide to wake up instead and to end the dilemma.

A group of young men leaning against a wall as if in a photograph but unapproachable, & I realize that I met them years ago on a forgotten trip to somewhere – Italy, Mexico, I can’t remember.

[These poems by Jerome Rothenberg were recovered, along with numerous others, for Retrievals, a volume of Uncollected & New Poems 1955-2005, to be published later this year by Mark Weiss & Junction Press. Thirteen previous installments have appeared since 2008 on his blog Poems and Poetics.]

I had one of those dreams last night where I find myself taking care of a huge number of birds.

I had one of those dreams last night where I find myself taking care of a huge number of birds.

The dream often goes like this: I discover that, unknown to me, there is another bird in the cage with Lester, and that all this time I have been feeding and taking care of only Lester, and not this other bird, who is almost dead. In the dream, I always nurse the neglected bird back to health, but there are always close calls. Sometimes the extra bird, or birds, are not in Lester's cage, but in some other part of the house--frequently under the bed. Once, I was on a pirate ship pitching and heaving in the middle of the storm, and I had to prevent several parrots from drowning and going overboard. In another version, I'm swimming through rough seas while two parakeets sit on my head, singing.

In last nights dream, I heard parrots outside, so I went out to see them. There were two hyacinth macaws sitting in the tree about the apartment building dumpster. They looked quite ragged, but I eventually coaxed them down and took them into our apartment. I found an extra, hyacinth-macaw sized jungle gym and put it in one corner of the room. The macaws began to play on the gym and settle in quite happily. Lester didn't mind them, either. After the macaws were relaxed and preening, Mark came in with two rainbow conures. I found a large cage for them and some extra toys, etc, and soon they were settling in, too. Some version of this kept happening--either I'd go outside and see two parrots and bring them in, or Mark would. At a certain point, our entire apartment was filled with parrots--two to three in each cage (Lester was the only one not sharing his space).

The last bird that Mark brought in was a huge pelican--but in the dream it looked more like a cross between a pelican and a stork, since the bird was very tall. The pelican's beak was cracked, and there were stitches all around her neck. We nursed the pelican/stork back to health, and eventually removed the stitches.

I was seated near one end of a very long dining table. A few strangers were present. The table was covered by a cheap white cloth that looked like a giant napkin. The main meal had been eaten. In the distance, the salt and pepper shakers looked like windmills or towers, and seemed to be part of a large, rugged landscape. My mother was standing beside me, fretting about what had happened to her butterscotch pudding. As usual, she had poured it into the funny little champagne glasses we had when I was growing up. But the pudding was grainy, pale, and thin. When I asked her if she’d remembered the brown sugar, she was too heartbroken to speak. Then someone said, “Corn starch?” I looked around. That someone was me.

My dream had me pushing carts around a hotel basement somewhere and there was a vague menace.

Last night I dreamed I was sewing up babies' heads with thick silk skeins of embroidery thread, garnet red, sky blue, and grass green. The skeins were wound in the usual lazy 8 shape but the thread was difficult, slippery, and I thought the thread was actually skeins of human veins in spite of their marvelous colors and textures. The babies were lined up in a long crib in a Victorian hospital. They weren't crying, but they were quiet. I guess passive would be a good word. Perhaps they had been drugged. The embroidery thread slithered in and out of my needle, refusing to stay put so I was constantly stopping to re-thread, and this was the only thing that caused me concern.