I had a dream about lines, monkeys, the smell of baking cakes, a wall of frozen rodents, the smell of a room after sex, ozone in the air, which I could see they looked like the tips of nails violating the ceiling, two shoes on the wire under which the big trucks drive, swinging things, trees, buns and buns of trees, transparent leaves, elaborate colors, like those inside the colon or heart or ear.
Slow movement and jaggy lines, which are things from another work, which has yet to be spun out.
Lilly said it was all oh so much homespun and yarning. Anybody, she said, can make a random list and make it mean something to someone; it’s all about odds making. How many recipe poems have you read about grilled squirrel.
Dream something else, she said. Dream a river with just as much flotsam as water, wait for the one face to rise to the oily surface and pluck it out, just the head and the suffocation-white face, and kiss it on the lips, which is what I had a dream about two weeks ago. Just kidding.
I had a dream about different ecologies, I said. I climbed to the top of a tree and saw a line of purple ants. A big blue slug was curled on a frond and watching it with a lamp of dinner in its eyes was a thing that was both a chicken and a shark, which is about as real as I can get. That’s how I broke my arm. I woke up on the floor. I’d fallen from the top bunk. It wasn’t the pain that woke me up.
I study the brain under the conditions of REM. Still, sure, I watch you in your sleep, you sleeping just yesterday. At lunch the other day a woman persisted in looking at you. Her shirt was blue. Sometimes she looked like she was about to come over, ask, do I know you, did we go to school together, are you my long lost brother? But then she appeared to forget what had been on her mind. She went back to her lunch, which was some sort of soup. You didn’t even notice. More than three quarters of a day is pure solipsism.
No, it wasn’t the pain that woke me up, I said. It was something else.
