Good Friday reflection

*

As Jesus walks or stumbles toward his death, he encounters the women. In Luke they are called "daughters of Jerusalem", nothing more. They lament the crime that is coming to pass and that they cannot stop. They are powerless. In the way the world measures power they have none at all. And Luke doesn't even tell us their names. It is amazing how many women in the Bible don't even have names. The Syro-Phoenician woman. The widow with the mite. The widow with the judge. They have no names yet we know intensely who they are.

Here at this moment in time you almost feel the Gospel writers are saying: Look how low Jesus has now fallen. All the men have fled. There are only women.

Only?

Only women? If the women in the Bible are only women, if they have no worldly power, why do they strike us, strike me, as of an awesome power? What is power anyway?

On Good Friday all power seems to be veiled and put away. It's true that some toy soldiers are moving forward to inflict terrible pain, a murder, but the soldiers and officials don't feel powerful. They are mechanical, as empty as machines. Evil has no freedom of movement, it is just a stereotype.

For us the power of Friday is in the figure moving to his cross. And it is surely in those women. Because they are there. They have shown up, they are present, they witness. They are with Jesus. They don't need titles and sometimes not even names to be fairly the most powerful people on the planet. How could that be? What is the power? It is not a power that can be cashed in or used. If you are Jesus's closest, witness, that's something you can't trade in for something more valuable. Nothing is more valuable than that.

These women are at the center. I want to stand next to them. At least I say that now but had I lived in their time there's a good chance that I would have scorned them as the other men were doing. Let's face it. there's a good chance I would have scorned Jesus too. Within my historical moment I am a coward and a conformist too. Anyway you have to take a contemplative distance to understand the deep worth of something that you take for granted when you just live with it day by day.

Gazing at these amazing women I can't help thinking of my mother. She was like your mother: a totally unique and powerful being who hid like so many women of the 50s and 60s inside a cloak of anonymity. In a way she didn't expect people to notice her. When she did something she certainly didn't expect it to be acknowledged or rewarded. When I was a suicidal teenager she saved my life, I think more than once. Well, isn't that what women just did? She was a life-giver and a life-saver. Hey, no awards were going to be passed out for that. Aren't life-givers pretty common?

But now she's dead and very few people on earth even know her name. And I would give just about anything to be able to stand next to her now.

*

Story: Sam and me

*

I was so young. I dreamed of falling into the arms of a man. Then what? Feeling safe? There was nothing about a man or his arms that guaranteed safety. I knew what a man was. I even knew from the inside. They were all as dumb and as blind as I was. It made no sense to love them so much. But sense was something on the sidelines. I dreamed of his arms.

Sam was my confessor, spiritual guide. He was somewhat fat -- I loved fat men. He had arms that looked just right to me. I confessed many sorts of things to him but one thing I was careful not to confess to him, the love itself, my love for him, that remained unspoken and even undemonstrated. So the confessions were incomplete from the very start and oddly, paradoxically, became even more so as my love for him grew. That is, the larger it became, the more there was to hide from him. More and more as the time went by. Finally, the thing that filled my life was the one thing I couldn't say.

And, you know, as I loved him more and more, in a way I respected him less and less. Because he had no idea at all about the terrible thing playing me. He was wiser than most people I knew and at the same time very blind. Insofar as it could, my love expanded within his blindness. A piece of art for art's sake, a thing with no application at all.

He took me to his gym. Bad idea! I tried to turn away as he unwrapped the cloth and linen from his toasty body. He was indifferent to his own physical presence, the way straight men used to be, in the early eighties, say, before they came to recognize that they were pretty too, like the women that they long for. We ran along the trail, hearing highway noise that couldn't touch us. The knees sang. I was so happy in that temporary way. He was very fit for his size. Some sort of tank. Sam.

The horrible part of my divorce, he said, is that I not only miss the kids but I still love her, as much as the day we married.

I could not control my drinking and I still can't. I spend all my time running away from it. I can't actually achieve anything because I'm still running.

Kid, you are so lucky not to have an obsession like that. I do have obsessions and they're huge, I said. I was sliding open the door to my own revelation and definitely keeping it closed at the same time. Unfortunately I am great at keeping closed.

Sam, like most of the other clergy that I'd met, and all of the best of them, "supported gay rights", even fervently but he didn't have a clue what it might mean to be gay, how deep it went. He thought it was a "way of life". Without wanting to, straight people really did think it might be something superficial like a "choice". They of course didn't feel the power, the trembling. I mean, they didn't feel where it was centered.

We walked through the leafy labyrinth. He kept touching my shoulder, hugging me. Each time it felt as though my skin would simply slither off and I would just become a pool of liquid. The sheer unplaceable feeling of it. Oh you poor paralyzed penis, you don't fit anywhere! It was a gun that pointed more at me than at him. Back in the locker room I didn't know what to do. I went to the john and tried the squeeze the feeling out.. Toothpaste from a tube. In soreness longing only grew. He was so beautiful, so warm, he was more than a man to me. How could that be? What could it mean?

I was in love with his goodness -- his goodness heated me up. I didn't want to soil him, i just wanted him.

An icon with God flashing through? More likely utter idolatry? As I stepped into the shower with him I became Russia, as in a game we used to play in college. Russia? Big sad place. People on their own offering sweet kindness, giving rubles to strangers. But unable to take charge. Unable to organize. Soaked in booze. Riddled with corruption but not really corrupt, just unable to cough it up and spit it out. So decay stayed put like an absolute given. Oh, they were so resigned and their resignation was like steps that criminals climbed -- the steps basically the backs of humans who couldn't remember how to stand up again. Really we longed for a strong man to pick us up. We craved a strong man, a man without doubts. That was Russia, frozen in fear. Not healthy at all. Not likely to get better. And yet there midst all the ball-clashing warriors, the naked strangers, there was Sam, not exactly America but a little bit like America. Warm, brown and completely oblivious of me. It almost seemed that if I touched him he wouldn't make the effort to feel the touch. Oh, this dissolution of my soul, it couldn't be good.

Sam, nights dreaming of you. Mornings recovering from what didn't even happen. Sam.

So. Established distance. Went weeks without seeing you. Sam. Wandered the street at night instead of sleeping. Scrutinized every man I passed. Ah, Sam, scrutinized was the wrong word, an unhappy word. What they were was to me completely veiled. It was the veil I studied and got lost in. The shape of the groin, that I memorized. Idolatry? But none of the words applied correctly.

When I saw someone who looked like you, I would be pretty much devastated, Sam. And many did look like you. Like but not really like enough, not the same, so nothing like.

Grace fell on me even in my bad dreams. I felt affection -- well, ignorance but also affection -- for every man on earth. Any color. Any class. The unbeautiful in fact were what they were claimed not to be. Ravishing. Important. And the women I loved even because they couldn't hurt me.

Trashy roads, dangerous, with these guys like angels walking along. Sam, there was a grace. Not to mention searing pain. A spear from my throat to my butt.

In the bars, Sam. Places you would never go. Hot ones leaning back, peeling the label off their beerbottles. Feeling mentation drain. Too much noise to think through. People liked that. Music like hot syrup from the speakers. Agitation. Vital energies leaking into the darkness. So much motion would have to land somewhere. I had had to fast for a blood test, so why not? just continued the fast. So I was light headed and next to hallucination. The guy that looked most like you was at the top of the stairs, theatrical. In a single beat he just fell forward like a panel of flesh, down the stairs, joints like water. It would be some drug the rest of us never heard of. Solemn Samoan bouncers carried him out of the house, forever. Miguel stood next to me. Never ever do that, he said.

I dreamed that night of a larva, soft and white, a creature so soft that the smallest touch would crumple it and pulp it into juice. Sadness, so vulnerable -- why would anything let itself be so easily attacked? Then the morning tried to pull itself together. Was that dream creature me? Or was that a form of God, daring to enter the world without armor?

I needed my guide to help me ponder things. But it wasn't even safe to go near him, that is, near you. You you. I was left exposed to Jesus without mediation. Sitting on the edge of my bed I shook softly and silently four times but no. It wasn't that I shook but that I was shaken. Not alone, I wasn't at all.

Miguel Miguel. I found him at the coffee house and tugged him by his sleeve, for all the world like a spoiled child, right, not far from the truth, both spoiled and child. Take me home with you Miguel. Please. Let's not wait.

I need to f*******ck you instantly.

What's got into you, crazy boy? he asked. Is it that you've lost access to your clay angel?

To fat old Sam, that pious fake of yours. Then I kissed him to shut him up and he finally got up from his couch. It was low low low. Somehow we got to his apartment and climbed the stairs.

Miguel was someone that to my shame (but sort of a numb shame because, in fact, I barely thought about it) I had ignored and possibly in some strange way even scorned -- because he had always seemed to me a bit sluglike in his effeminacy and we straightish looking guys were always afraid of getting near and suffering contagion -- this is a disgusting thing for me to say much less admit and I wouldn't say it except that if I don't tell the whole truth, why even bother? But now the cards had all restacked in a different order because 1) he'd gone to church with me and knew Father Sam too; 2) being feminine is not such a bad thing, is it?; and 3) well, Miguel had this odd Miguel quality that could not be scorned. Not in my condition for sure.

He opened the door, I jumped onto the bed like a beached fish and then the wonderful part began. Ignoring my infused genitals as though they weren't even there, he slipped off my bloody shoes and solemnly caressed my feet and that was it. When I squirmed on the bed he grabbed them from a different angle that was all.

These have been stepped on and despised too long, he said.

Little wallflowers always sitting in their cardtable chairs, at the rim of the dance floor, my poor little feet, always having to dance but never being asked to dance. They melted under the unexpected attention as the rest of the body drifted into and out of sleep. Could feet be awake by themselves?

I left him at 5 am. We had been intimate but hadn't had sex, which a lot of people considered to be impossible, not to mention a loss of time. The expression "like a virgin", what it really signified was a time when knowing a person had multiple tracks, deepening intimacy that didn't go only one direction. Maybe Freud was upside down and sex was not the substructure of everything else but itself only a superstructure of something richer and leafily truer, whose existence we had stopped noticing or suspecting. You know, Miguel said, you are really a bottom at heart. You are not afraid of black men, you're comfortable with women even when they lead, you treated with respect, at least once you let yourself do it. You're a bottom pretending to be a top. That's part of being a Christian anyway. The bottom. The shame.

You know, he said, it used to hurt me so much to see you walking through that bar, twisted tighter than a pretzel. Trying to be so tough.

In the morning I had to rush away from my chaste friend. In the courtyard beautiful Lili and the others were rushing to their yoga. We kissed like apples bobbing. I had to rush home to get ready for work.

In the shower I thought about Sam. I still loved him but didn't crave him like a bad food anymore. Let that person be. I could feel him in the water but didn't try. Let it go. I will set you free of me and me free of you. My little cross bounced on my clavicle. Sam Sam Sam.

I dressed and went in to work, sort of a long ten hour sleep. Then I climbed out and scrambled home, stopping at Sam's apartment on the way -- thinking I could risk at least that. I assumed we could interact like 2 normal humans, whatever shape that interaction might take. I found him packing boxes in a half-empty echoey room. Man, I'm so glad to see you and get a chance to say goodbye.

I started helping him fill a box, moron that I am. I had to move slowly because the foundation of the floor was not quite steady. The world rocked and changed its angle like a heavy boat or rather a light boat with something very heavy in it. Looking out the window you might see west, you might see south. I had to hold my body still.

I wanted to be free of him but I didn't want him to leave. I was still lost in something like idolatry. What was so damaged in me that this could happen?

I have to go try to patch things up a little bit and at least see the children, take care of them or try, he said. It's been like living with half my organs removed. You're so stable you maybe won't understand -- how unstable and incomplete I feel. There are aspects to marriage that maybe you'll never know, in your situation. And I wonder if you're the lucky one. We all know it's better not to be so bound to the world.

As he talked I managed to look at him and saw -- something unexpected -- the image of someone I would soon not be seeing, I mean, I already saw him a thousand miles away, and me right here, trying not to stagger as the room moved like that idiotic boat. A big chunk of something was missing right next to my heart, on top of my heart. How did it feel? Was the best thing to have it just forcibly pulled out like this?

I was like a dog who'd just been given an exotic worrisome treat -- maybe it was toxic, maybe not -- and who urgently needed to take it into solitude, to taste it and break it down and see what it really was.

*

Poem: In the kitchen

*

As close to me
as my own breath
were the people I
expected to be with

forever -- she sat, she stood
in the kitchen so familiar
that I didn't even need
to look at her to see her.

In my memory a crumb falls
& the dog is there
brushing my ankles
with a sweet puff of air

& everything taken
beautifully for granted
as an eternal routine
until it ended.

*

Poem: Prayable space

*

He'd been unbalanced
as long as he'd been,
and too often leaned against
himself and fallen.

He was immune
to the scientific
worship of reason
because of the hairline crack

in his own.
Reality
was what you could not contain
or share -- privacy

was its being,
its burden,
its flame, though perilous to hang
from or lean on.

Community was
only where you went to assuage
reality's
intensity and damage.

The fellowship was a mercy
like the physical
law
that broke one's fall

inward
to where
the word
of God pulsed with fear.

"It's only a movie."
Was he insane?
Or was insanity
what made him ask that question?

There was a small
puncture
hole
that widened and tore

all the secular,
a place that if justice
flourished anywhere
was its only access.

This hole formed into a cell
with birdsong spattered
on the wall:
so blue and serene was the word.

It was a house of prayer
where a brokenness churned
the air
and one's eyeballs burned.

I can speak
with you here
but no not speak:
I am nothing but ear.

Through some canal the known
world lay spread
in a prayable condition
where fate was liquid

again,
something to shuck
like a skin
or unfold like

a story
whose meaning
lay
in the future waiting.

The secular
caked in doubt
while something in its interior
spat him out

into a place
beyond destitution
that was
surely big enough for everyone.

He heard piano
music behind a door
that he could open if he wanted to --
it wasn't blocked anymore.

The person
whose place this was remained
unspoken and unknown
as the puncture hole widened.

*

Poem: When I was sick

*

At 17 I had the flu
and couldn't go to school.
I boarded yet I barely knew
a single living soul.

My mother brought me nourishment.
I felt her come and go
but was too feverish and faint
to thank her. Did she know?

My sickness brought along this fear:
"your weakness is your fate".
But her strength saved me from despair
and she would sit up late.

And now I'm strong and she is dead
but it still seems more fitting
the other way: me sick in bed
her at my bed's edge sitting.

*

Poem: Wax

*

She was wax
in the sun --
existence had to fix
itself on someone.

Oh do not be
like the girl in the parking
lot leaning sullenly
on her thug's hip, enslaved so young.

Everywhere so many
frauds.
The only real authority
God's.

Can you go
blindly
and follow
someone you don't see,

slip the carapace
of pleasing
off, let the apparatus
of church fall with a clang,

let the inner
be exposed
though still too tender
to go outside?

She was not going anywhere.
Where she needed to be
was here
already.

If I could only
obey my own
feel for my
own intention,

nothing but wax
melting purpose-
fully in the flux
of that other one's purposes.

*

Poem: Disarray

*

A sense my disarray
brought me closer to God
on a pathway
almost never trod.

I can't judge I can't
and it's not
that I won't
but I can't do it.

God's own beauty
blew me up like a balloon
Without that air I was nobody
and nothing not even a man

So for me to be obsessed
was just to breathe
God was too close to be embraced
or even simply be with.

In the presence one said
no no give me space
I am buffeted --
but in absence distress

and the old disarray,
which was good
in its own way
because it told me what I wanted.

My craving for immediacy,
considered
okay in a sex criminal or junkie,
in a believer seemed weird,

like a lunge
into worship without
knowledge
to sustain it.

Probably whatever bad thing
anyone could say
about me would cling
as a truth and never flush away,

but my God! this poem
is not about me
but about him.
And he knows my disarray.

*

Poem fragment: The X in the heart

*

In that country it was as if
everyone
was forced to be alive
because deaths were none

deaths were not but only
people disappeared
as if they moved away
without a way to forward.

The deceased
there was not one example of
so it was hard not to exist.
Everyone was alive.

But there was a hole
in the flank of one house
& the people
inside were in distress

at the mess and unfixedness,
her bookshelves lined with gods,
her walls deep with celebrities
in defiant attitudes,

but where was she?
She didn't
even say
where she went.

In the hall
dogs howled --
nobody could console
the child.

But look: everyone
who is is alive & nothing
is gone by definition
no one is missing

there
is only
here
the rest is pathology,

useless tears
of spoiled
children kicking tires.
The world it has been sealed

& those removed
we do not approach
or speak of or to -- we avoid
even their touch

& O! this X at the center
of our hearts no one
will look into ever ever.
We do not look no no -- just fall in.

& O! there are no words
to say or unsay,
only these dissonant chords
we will never play.

*

Poem: Not by merit

*

It's not by merit
that I live.
By grace or by error -- not by right
I have what I have.

My worth
must be applied from outside --
rooted in the earth,
watered and fed

by one whose reflection
is what you see
when
you think you're seeing me --

the same one who shines
in you the same
way -- so we wear each other's reflections,
though we feel queasy inside them.

If we back away
from our being
kin -- if now we
seem bound by loathing,

that hatred
should in fact
be pointed
inward to the naked

self whose love
for you, that too
is of
the radiant one within you.

God's embodiment
is -- I don't know -- it is so humble,
so beautiful, so low -- I don't
know -- it is out of our control.

But how can people be
"hard to be with"
having the same being obscurely
underneath?

Such sickness in the news,
warmongers
so anxious
to break the mirrors

and deny that the God
who peers from an ugly face
might be their own God connected
to their own ugliness.

Suppose ugliness embraced
took on the semblance
of grace, suppose disgust
were self-directed violence,

suppose God not only was
but circulated
actively through the likes of us
unseen and unmerited,

would we change?
Would everything
become as strange
as our breathing?

If I woke would I give
you not my merit
but the real thing I have?
And would you accept it?

*

Poem: Proving God

*

When they challenged me to "prove"
my God I was struck by the oddness:
you prove something you don't have.
What you have you simply witness.

God seemed too basic to prove.
But if this was too clear to me
even to be labelled "if"
why did so many others disagree?

There had to be mediation.
We couldn't both be right.
Truth can only be one -- but the more one
it is, the more it feels remote.

My sense of truth was near
but confused, not that it was
but that I was, I suppose, there was a blur
pressed against my soul's moist glass,

something it was all too easy
to call my own desire
but what use could that be?
I longed not for myself but for another.

The world had only one will
that I could feel and it was not
my own but thrust like a staple through my soul
and was blunt yet I couldn't fathom it,

never quite managed to understand, couldn't
write it down as a to do and do it
because the need was so relentless and insistent
and all of me was fastened to it.

There was pain like a shovel
unearthing the old site
of our first warm bonding -- it still
held -- just barely -- but

could not be used
or redeemed in the day to day
bob and weave that passed
like a history in me.

My life was of little use
even to me but I held on-
to it "for dear life" and it was dear as it was
even to exist for not much reason,

praying
for change not
actually changing
so not doing it only wanting it,

as though what I want-
ed still
wasn't
attainable only thinkable.

But only thinkable? one thought
absorbed all my interest
because stakes so high were bound into it
there could be no other contest.

There was only one contest
and all else
lost its ambition to exist
if this one were false.

Goodness leaked
from our world at a rate
so unbraked
that even the measure had gone flat.

Most of my heroes were dead now
and my own soul seemed to hover
at this perilously low
caressing pressure.

I prayed for sheer prayer
craving an external
power
to erect my own will

and the sun shafted me
on a beam of hot fluff stronger
than the most sinewy
human architecture.

There I lay on a spear that was thrown
by but not decoupled
from intention.
And if it pushed it also pulled.

*

Poem: Law

*

it's just telepathy
embodied when
strangers obey
a law -- in their aggregation

the cars at 4 stops
move as one -- unless an outlaw
makes the design collapse
by moving when the law says no.

A good law is a quasi-nuclear
force drawing us
into harmonious measure
at best frictionless.

Hence the deeper meaning
in Auden's suave
phrasing --
"law is like love".

It's a thing that constrains
and annoys
its victims -- you don't have independence
if your acts synchronize.

But complaining is a token --
a symbol of time
at peace: we complain
like children bickering in a happy home

and there will never be a paradise
without bickering if
you conceive paradise as a place
where humans live.


What do I want
from the law?
Ideally I wouldn't
know or want to know

the law is there.
I would have the luxury
of our living without judging each other.
I would be free

"from" it "within" it.
It would never need to be
called upon but
in not being used would set us free

to float between gears
in grace... but this is hard
to imagine seeing how injustice powers
the forward plunge of our world,

and how compulsively
even good people cheat
each other as if by
nature, as if they can't help it.

Then I would have law
not be a human creation
at all but spread above and below
the human,

well beyond
anything a poet
can understand
or write about.

It would encompass
the dead and gone
not just those few of us
who hold life's microphone.

Law would be love
when those most broken
of all have
their tiny portion

of I want to say existence
but it must be
some form of transcendence
we can align with, not see,

an alignment so incomplete
that we
die by law, yet pray for it
to come in its way: that is, completely.

*

Poem: The voice

*

Where did he hear
God's voice or did
he hear it indeed, did he ever
hear a voice not his but so closely related

to his own
most intimately
hidden -- his own unable-to-be-spoken
hopes of what his own life might be

that the voice lay in his tongue
and not on his ear -- was not imposed
by circumstances commanding
but simply said what needed to be said?

It was no second you inside you
telling you what
to do
and what not,

no no, not so split.
The voice was full of a consent --
his own -- but it
was really consent, it was not constraint.

He would hear the voice then lose it
but the swing of the loss
kept him chasing the part not lost:
its rightness -- looseness --

the seam of confidence
embedded in the darkness
as if mere chance
had slipped and become conscious.

Was it possible? You could really know
what to do and lean
within this feel of assurance that held you
close and guided you in?

Suppose silence were like little wells
where God stored messaging
in virtual particles
through which our day to day swung?

How could one hear this?
Surely the body
acting would catch this voice --
or mask it more likely.

The trick would be not to cover it
with chatter but to listen
to the X squeezing the heart
for a terrible beat then gone.

The trick would be to stay open
for the can't-measure
length of endurance even
to begin to hear.

So... the poet's ear was open like
a bird's
hungry beak.
And God fed it with mysterious words.

*

Poem: Soft strips of chance

*

In school he'd liked epigrams
and the way they could heave the most
unruly experiences into sums
that however simplified were not reduced.

A problem -- his own
work had never hooked the heart
of a distant person
caught up in shared hurt.

No poem was ever meant
to stand closed, intact
and pointlessly eloquent
but his did in fact.

But no. There was a cloud
of consciousness, like a chamois
cloth filled with wettest graphite, that stood
above the poem pulsing freely:

the ex-
ternal force of readership
that would flex
itself loose from an author's grip.

Around any willed object the abyss
of chance bit into that will -- but beyond
that abyss, in an almost mirrored place
a new consciousness took its stand.

So if he wrote well
(an "if" never proven)
that wellness might not be sterile,
if the reading were yet to happen,

and the randomness in
which writing lay
were a sort of moat beyond which recognition
slowly moved its eye.

In chance if there is chance there is no "unlikely"
or "impossible" -- there is no reasonable bet
you can just place over the sway
of its indifference to your plans for it.

And if this thing is wielded
by intention, why pretend you conceive
so awesome a Godhead
that just permits you to believe?

What surrounds us feels like destruction
but what surrounds
destruction feels more like creation
in its black and stylish bends,

this movement of time like a shiver that recurs
in a patterned way and seems as willed
in its careless spinning as a dancer's
pirouette through reality's perilous fluid,

a locus
of order, or of a world's slow
coming to order -- both perilous and conscious --
that seems suitable also

to be the stream down which poetry might flow
in fear of being devoured
but also -- or as though also
in a longing simply to be read.

For if he had traveled too far from
epigrams to return to their closure
still the Lord -- of epic and epigram --
stood nearer than ever -- in his fear.

*

Poem: Poor relation

*

You you you -- that person
bobbing in the mirror's
current, up then inexorably drawn
down, your own self moister than the water's.

Well they said to me: you own
nothing not even you
and even this particular introspection
will be taken away and rather soon too.

I said then I will give to God
the intention through me intended,
which I wish I'd not distorted
but know that I did.

I will give what's not mine
but that the giving
of my own intention
to give at least is not nothing

if it resonates with what more deeply
exists than I ever could
and if it makes me
a poor relation but still related.

What I have no choice but to give
to God I will give anyway
I will give what I don't have
I will give my nothingness away

I will give that I'm glad
about it. No. What I give
can't even be stated.
It's a nothing there's a lot of.

I am nothing nothing nothing.
In my own what seems this weary demise
I feel myself somehow also expanding
as God fills the room. Or his breath does.

*

Poem: "Punctured"

*

In church a human sound
came from
behind
him -- but there was no one behind him.

At the dance concert
the curtain never rose
but the entire stage was punctured
by a colored gas.

He held onto his chair
edge
out of fear
that he would fall onto the stage.

The dance circled
even behind his heart.
It swelled
and was rhythmically punctured --

like a something between
our death and us --
the dance lay not out front but in
the body breathed and was.

And I must be a part of this
forever he thought.
The soft gas caressed his face
and caught

his will up in its substance.
We make a community or a complete
world not just an audience.
When it ended he couldn't back out,

but followed
the dancer who looked most like
him down a still stage-feeling road
into a dream-cafe picturesque and frantic

with the need for art,
the abiding need
to speak it touch it enter it
be part of it and in that way abide,

despite Fashion that malevolent
god of fear strutting the aisle
trying to make us feel insignificant
drab and small.

Immune the dancer pulsed as if
awkwardly
with an almost corny declarative
right-now vibrancy.

I want to be
you, the spectator
said -- I mean completely
to be your

image witness lover
participant
closer than the mirror
image is to the person in it.

There is a gold tattoo
of grace carved across our multiverse,
with little characters in Hebrew
that cover our suicide scars.

If I could only get
closer to you
than that tattoo or than the inner side of that
tattoo.

Around them the cafe
throbbed with the displacement
of those who moved away
and those who stood their ground

coming back night after night --
menus slapped on
tables -- diners who when they sat
down could barely get up again --

liaisons that somehow ended
before dessert -- there were
marriages that lived and died
quickly or tried for forever.

Life was like an ode
to transience
embedded
in dance.

Lover and lover
stood on each side
of the mirror
distinct and united

inside the bright vitality
of other pass-
ersby
etched in glass.

Sometimes bodies contain such
a strangeness that when 2
of them touch
that touch dissolves and passes through --

an interaction occurs
but is so abstract
that the loneliness mirrors
itself and remains intact.

Goodbye goodbye
to our intense
reciprocity --
what we felt inside our dance.

Outside our protected
space a still unnamed disease
stood
waiting for us

to pause and it said honey
whether
quickly
or not -- wherever you are

I will find you and eat
you and afterwards take
Africa the whole of it
into my mouth as a snack.

People paused when they heard that voice
and they grew self-
conscious
held their breath and marched into the wall of

shadow at the back
of "company B"
that nostalgic and deathlike
ballet.

The survivor? He'd wake or half wake
at midnight to the sight
of soldiers marching into black
and not coming out --

then he'd suddenly wake --
to the same sight --
boys in black
night after night.

In the pit of reason's stomach lay
an abyss of contradiction
that reasoners groped to deny
without reason.

He slept through it, woke in it,
lived it -- a blackness laid
on top and under, a bottomless night
with him stretched across the lid.

In church not a mention of this.
But if he sat far back
then behind his ear the place
in its darkness seemed to speak.

Now he had become one of those adults
who do
nothing on impulse
nor do they know this nor wish to know --

but no that was not
exact not
precise not quite
it.

Fixity of place
was what he had to have,
every day the same office,
the same drab protective

home,
and in the morning the same road
wrapping him
in repetition like a shroud

for one year then twenty
and not even
gone away
because they were never there enough to be gone.

His dreams were of routine
the days and nights in denatured rows
along a boulevard of destitution,
endless personless days

and all of that just how
one lived, the repetition
meant to help you
both arrive at and be your own annihilation.

It didn't hurt.
It had the feel of
a late night news report
whose numbness was redemptive

for if time was a thing -- then a chunk
of what
exactly? each piece unique-
ly carved, bottomless and intricate,

born as if boneless, to be babied
and cooed till its unknown substance
overnight solidified
and took its place in the dance.

He found himself one night
outside then inside the old hall
of a genteel palace that
stood waiting for the wrecking ball to fall.

It was wounded like sacred space
and the troupe he'd seen long before
mysteriously was
also there.

He saw a troupe of kids expressing
what they had not
even felt yet -- things they would be feeling
in the future but not yet.

The curtain didn't rise but vanish.
The dancers pulled the room
into their gaseous swoosh.
It swept in front of and behind him.

His heart was a churn
with no place to churn against.
The dancers had not been born
when what they danced was danced,

as though what survived
death was not what stood
still but only what moved
and thus paradoxically died

and so only transient
things could become
permanently resident
in the perishing sensorium.

Something "between our death and us"
lay
in this gas
too exposed even to see precisely.

But I will take your presence
in any form that I can
whether in permanence or in transience
who knows? but in either case "in".

*

Poem: "Glove"

*

It was as though the prime
of one's life were a glove
that one put on for a time
and took off

without anything
about the hand inside
changing
except that it was now outside

that is, it was still a hand
and did what a hand did
nothing had happened
to it yet it had been abandoned

or driven between gears if time were gears
or if time was just a mechanism
for maneuvring between months and years
like a dead machine that moved but was always the same,

then something was as wrong
as the glove pulled in reverse
whose fingers would now be fitting
a different universe,

with the life spilled
out of a container
first young then old
really neither.

The body was not a vehicle
or furnishing or mode, not a disguise
device or brace, nor some metaphysical
obstacle either -- there was no well known thing it was --

not sliced matter -- not in fact separate
from one's own awkward
attempts to fit it
within this or a different word.

So if he lived it was not because I
remembered him (because
even my poor memory
was less than what I once knew him as),

but could I say intrinsically?
There was a dancer's picture on my wall.
He filled his body ecstatically
but was flat as a stepped on snail.

He lived not
because I remembered him, no, the other way,
it was the life that was at the root
of what memory occurred today.

Life flexes
fingers in the glove
and seems more than it is
possible for anything to be made of.

It was not just life but his
life, not representative
just the single thing it was
and in that smallness alive

at least not otherwise,
because what
twisted in my gut was
him: the hook of him shifting in the gut.

Life covered the darkness with hair
and gave off the rude spring-green
ever-helpless odor
not of skin but of what has come to wear skin.

And one's own realization -- while it passed through
the place that aged and never aged,
would it too be able to
remain in the passing where it was wedged?

Poem: Watery substance

*

He grew old without noticing --
was mental absence
a part of ageing?
Or did his caution make the difference?

Think. Think. Cast memory
back upon the sweet ones
gone suddenly or quietly but early,
because there is true absence.

The veteran's hands shake
too much to work --
he wheels his chair or leans back
on the worst bench in the park.

His buddies are dead.
Would that have been better?
He once saw a teenager explode
on a battlefield, a teenager,

and he thought
to himself wait
his life isn't done yet:
this kid's not even complete.

But complete? Where
was that now? Then the veteran
stopped thinking -- needed liquor
to wet his brain.

The poem's narrator
never went
to war nor
could he know what going meant.

He was naîve about a cost
not his to pay
at least
not overtly.

Time could be a purge of all one's
crudities and false hopes
but in the end experience
only emptied people out -- perhaps.

All roads led down into
wisdom he was sure -- life travelled down
into itself, but also into knowledge of itself as its term grew
long enough to curve back into recognition.

One's own slow death was worth having
because only from having first lost
this sense of being young
could the full sense of youth have been noticed.

"In school our teachers told us
to shape our future consciously
make the future conscious
or else it would turn to shape us its own way...

With us or without
us it would still occur
and our choice was to climb on top of it
or be dragged under.

I heard but didn't heed
their warning, not exactly, because
I couldn't decide
first of all who I in any fixed sense was

and then, much less, secondly who I wanted to
be -- no. No. I never never
knew who, but only how,
I knew only how to go after

the thing by continual questioning,
and I knew that I never wanted
to take such an awesome thing
as existence for granted."

It was of a mucousy consistency
the ground that kept humans
from plunging recklessly
into transcendence.

There was an athlete who had dipped one little bud
into Coke-white bone-
like dust and fell inside for good
and never played ball again

and shot himself -- by the sea.
One can still feel the water
sleepily
rocking his soft cadaver.

The salt water sinks and pulls itself back out
like the tears a survivor's lips will suck
up and sideways into the throat
where they will thicken and get stuck.

The parents who grieved are dead now too,
they themselves like children, faces
filled with transient woe
only in that everything now was,

transient I mean --
like the face a child would make
when its ice cream cone
fell onto the dirty brick.

"I have been one to survive
without deserving to,
I haven't earned life, I simply live.
Others did more. But that one thing, no.

Unmerited, precious,
it must be probed,
saved, understood, if only because
I must know, were they honored or robbed?

I was never Orfeo
not to look at the one I rescued,
no. Impossible not to
see then caress that sweet head,

wondering at life not death,
since life barely remains
to me as well, and we both
skirt nonexistence and both retain existence,

mysterious substance, of which
there cannot be
too much
too long too far or -- my love -- too many."

*

Poem: "There is a space"

*

There is a space
around your heart, a once rigid
space where judgment was
uncomfortably wedged,

now just air,
filled with a breath
that previously you were
scared to breathe with,

now as it were
the lodging of prayer
too full to censure
itself or any other

creature.
Mere prayer.

*

Jorge: Dreams of pollution and chance

*

1. So Father Sam and I sat in analysis, or he in analysis and I in meltdown. Saturated, marinated, untranscended. My esteem for him deepened by the second, and so I had none left over for myself.  I hated myself. "You hate yourself but God does not seem to have that option, God loves you to the core. What does that do to your own petty perspective? Jorge, tell me."

2. My dreams were founded in injustice. They were truer than true. They were filled with knocking like a heart beating, not I think my own.  Was that someone knocking on my door? Did I even have a door in the porous corridors of dreamland? Maybe no.  The dream always grew assertive, it would demand to be heard. I tried not to listen, that was just another aspect of the dream.

3. The dream began when I stole someone's shell. So obviously we were animals here -- I suppose I mean "dumb" animals.  I climbed inside the shell and hunkered down, I would have closed it if only I could have.  Ah! The shell is a door that you can lock, so there's the door I dreamt about, anything to keep strangers out. And if the door weren't there then there wouldn't even be strangers -- one would be by definition exposed. I see (the priest said). This tender chitin-less abdomen would be exposed to everyone's forks and teeth. I would be delivered. I would be dead. And I know this because I have had time to reflect on it, and here is the most gruesome part: this reflection itself, couldn't have happened if I hadn't already had the space of reflection, which is what the shell is, the shell separates me from the sort of Darwinian chaos that I dream about, whether that chaos ultimately exists or not.  I mean that its nonexistence is as scary as its existence.  So it followed that I had to have the shell even to regret having it. So why must I feel so bad about something so inevitably necessary?  

The knocking (Sam said) is your conscience rattling around, and did you really think dreamland suspended such things? Oh (I said) but this too is a luxury and a gift, this having a conscience and feeling bad. This proves that I have won, whatever the game is that we're playing. The one whose shell I stole doesn't have guilt or anything because she is crushed and squished by the side of the road, like that poor indecisive squirrel.

4. I took what she had -- now that was disgusting.

5. I cannot live with myself -- but I do. So obviously I can.  I believe this dream guilt is largely cosmetic, something one must apply to the face as protection against the real thing.  Real guilt eats the soul raw, it is like a Darwinian predator, only I do not see how it benefits or has any fight to survive of its own to talk about.  It's as mindless as a shark.

6. In dreamland I am like one of those animals that nests inside another animal and eats it while it is still alive. The taste is better, is fresher that way, not that my victim is alive but that I am so appalled and horrified as I eat. The horror is like a spice.  God, how disgusting we humans are.  And yet they talk of innocence! And they talk of righteousness! Humans! They discuss the imitation of Christ, the ignorant fools -- we are so infinitely far from being able to imitate -- or even recognize -- those beings we pretend to be the images of -- and that we don't begin to understand.

7. So, Father Sam said, holiness would be like Groucho's country club that wouldn't be worth joining if they let such as you join. I don't think so. Now the 2 of them, Sam and the other one, the protagonist, walked through the hot mud puddles, ignoring the bar television that every dream has. The 2 men stepped into the whirlpool. It was impossibly hot -- J sank down -- looked over, accidentally saw his mentor's privacy, his groincurls, looked away quickly. And image as hot as an iron pressed against the brain.  Probably the amygdala was involved, that mass of "feelers".  I slid down into the bubbles to hide my -- what? to hide my feelings? Was my throat swollen? Heart throbbing? Was it just that I was so happy to be next to him? To have a friend and a ladder to God? It wasn't just that God had given me existence but that this existence was sometimes too happy to bear. An existence multiplied by itself, an abundance. Stolen from oblivion, not even mine really. Just handed to me (as opposed to someone else) by chance? What was chance? Did I even believe in chance?

8. When the atheist Dennett debunked design in favor of chance he thought he was closing a door that in fact he was opening. Chance! What was that? Something no human could ever manage -- or understand -- or even worship blindly -- because all our supposedly free acts ended up quite obviously reducing to old banal patterns recurring, not chance at all. Not worthy of being called chance. Because nobody could even say what it was. They say that human creatures are not deep enough or broad enough to use a word like chance, to mouth it like a known quantity, because it's really just a placeholder like zero, it means not even nothing at all, not even that, not even that much, not even nul, not to us. Because no one can define chance and then see what they define. They say the word it and call it awesome, that it that isn't even there. All right. I could go on. You know how every supposedly random number turns out to have factors, is caused, how sad. Jazzmakers improvisations follow rotes in the ground, have been sung a million times before, the artists' inspirations are all borrowed. So chance. So chance, what is that? It would be profound and transcendent if it existed and were not just this meltdown, this hallucination. Chance. If you don't call it design it only goes deeper -- like a tick you refuse to pluck. Dennett's chance is in fact entirely designed -- to stop discussion for one thing. But then his own silence begins to speak. The thing exorcised comes back doubled and trebled and ready to kill. Saying design exists or doesn't resolves to a single statement. "Nothing" is so scary because it is not, that is, not not scary, but not nothing, it is the "something" there that the atheist exploits and uses and that with him or without him we still fear. And we do. Of profound things there is no shading between discerning a pattern and discerning no pattern, which would be not discerning one at all because -- why? Because the light is too bright to pick it out. And the truth is that we don't even know what chance is. Nor do we acknowledge the implications of the fact that even chaos and utter disorganization have a design to be teased out. Don't even talk to me of chance. It probably exists but way beyond our reach -- there is only one powerful enough to wield chance and live. Not a journalist, to be sure.

9. So I was sitting next to Sam for a reason. Chance was not a factor.

10. And I only pretended when, just "by chance", I climbed out of the soapy spiralling mud and reached for my towel, oops, no towel at all! The waitresses circulated with their little napkins and cold-sweating glasses, little paper parosols floating, etc. I tried to think of my naked body as a kind of clothes.  Men's bodies stood around as if without the men inside and that was eloquent: this is not really you but your carapace.  The football team stood around the talking pizza box that I have never been able to shake from my dreamworld.  Coach's eyes, they flicked around the room like black flies, I tell you.  This is veristic, nothing has been added or taken away except, well, the basic laws of reason.  in this place whenever the world tilts I immediately recognize that we're on a ship, if only because my body --  my shell -- has filtered out the very concept of an earthquake, seeing them as intellectual constructions, not possible occurrences, but there it was again, as if immune to the simplifying power of a dream.

11.  And that was the nub: that discontinuity made the truest reality -- those fissures in the ground itself.  But the moment you accept them they become continuous.  Follows from this another essential that reality comes from outside my own tidy (?) being.  And yet they say a dream is all "inside the head" -- but not so -- au contraire.   The power of the dream is one's recognition of what in it is more than oneself, in other words most of it.  

12.  I sat disconsolate at the pool's side, or was it the ocean?  Then Estelle stopped to pick me up and drive me to the suburbs to see... to see Estelle, though even at the moment I knew this made no sense.  You can be multiple people conceptually but not in space, which only meant that this wasn't space, so what could it be instead?  The casting back of one's mind into one's memory, which was only the casting of itself into itself?  Wouldn't such a casting also create 2 people and not just one?

13.  She drove with utter confidence, she drove with liking, she liked to drive.  She came from a simpler and somewhat lovelier age when the other drivers never entertained the thought of killing you.  She was polite and competent -- later they took her licence away because she turned across a double yellow line and didn't remember her name when the officer asked -- that was just temporarily flustered about it.  And he was rude to her, she didn't like that.  she cried, never really recovered from the loss of her driving power.  Enough of that, the key to a memory is that the bad thing that happens later (in its inevitable and tragic fashion) has absolutely no effect on the goodness of the good thing that was previous, the good thing always remains intact.  So that you can immerse yourself in it without necessarily at every moment recalling what came later, what indeed at this very moment must have not yet come.  And you were glad.  She chatted while the 2 of you drove, she didn't care you were in that inevitable dream cliche wearing nothing but your shell.  Then you all arrived and greeted the little dog at the front door who peed on your foot and peed and peed.  And you were somehow wearing shoes again, and they were much too nice to be ruined like that, although at the same time you weren't wearing any shoes.  And you said to yourself: this is enough, wake up now please.

14.  There seemed to be a theme of water, Father, and if only I could be sure it was cleansing.  But I left wet footprints everywhere and climbed across Los Angeles, one wing to the other, on little stone steps as unstable as lily pads, a strange recurring dream I've had for years.  Sometimes I find myself bicycling on the freeway, through the very worst neighborhoods.  And I wold ask myself not "what do these dreams mean?" but simply "where does this amazing feel come from?"  Because waking life such as it was so often lacked all these feelings.  They where there but I didn't feel them -- not when I was awake.

15.  There was a drought of dreaming in my life, Father, and I knew I could see Estelle in no other way -- because death is a most importunate presence here, in waking as in sleeping.  It doesn't let us visit them, it tells us time's up before the time has even gotten under way.  I pressed the liquid doorbell and looked down.  The little dog had covered me in liquid waste from the shins on down -- and the little thing himself was covered, poor thing -- and no one would ever come to answer the door -- because this door was as if exorcised, de-haunted irreversibly -- no one was there or would ever be there.  And as I leaned, was it to take off my shoes or put on my shoes?  was it to put on or take off the pants?  And then I said to myself, this is enough -- I want to wake up.  Easily said, more easily done.  I lay panting on the bed.

16.  There was a streak of light on the wall, humble in the way it didn't go anywhere.  You could see it splitting the wall in two.   I felt a space around my heart, a feeling of God's being between -- as for instance, in begin between the light and what it rested on.  The essence of waking was to be able to hold onto this thought for some time.  Birds were singing in a dissheveled way on the trellis.  Suppressed activities could be heard beyond the shell of not having to act in which I lay but even less than that, a sort of virtual rocking.  I prayed in my clumsy way -- for some of the internal squabbling to get tired and desist so that the morning could come unblocked.  Between things lay spread not extension but presence.  I lay in a place of truths too deep to prove or almost even to share, even with oneself.  Did it exist?  Somet mes it was  a melancholy place, too thoughtful to impress itself on neighbors, on colleagues.

17.  The sun was not a sign.  The sun was not a blemish.  The sun was not a pointing hand.  The sun was not a clue or a puzzle.  The sun was not a person.  The sun was not a calibrated substance.  The sun was not a ploy.  The sun was neither this nor that.  But between the sun and the wall lay reality itself.

18.  I walked into the living room and the rug crackled.  Whenever I touched a doorknob I got a shock.  There was Estelle in that special hospital bed they'd set up so she could be in the swing of things -- but instead she lay as if below the mattress, sunk more deeply than a body ought to go.  Was I wanting her death?  No no, but only closure -- yet only one kind of closure seemed possible.  So every thought was pollution and time was fraught, literally freighted with equivocation.  I try to pray but everything seems to have left me, she said.  Oh Estelle. I answered.  It isn't that, it's just -- but I have to go, I'm late for work.  And she looked at me, dismissing me from her thoughts already, but not exactly.  The sun fell on her collection of little animals and circulated between them -- they splashed in it.   But I felt dirty getting into my car.  And somehow it was once again Estelle driving the car, with that calm competence that had always eluded me, was unavailable to a walking mess like myself.  She drove us into town -- through the dusk.  Dusk!  Well, it felt real if nothing else did.

19.  May you hear a sign tonight, she said as I closed the door.  I walked into the windowy building with a heavy bag in my hand -- books? gym clothes?  The dreamland abridged all the business of ID cards etc.  That left me time to wonder where I was.  A recovery center?  Well, I had just enough time to wonder, was able to wonder, while the men all moved like a slow fluid to the back room.  Since I was a man, I of course followed.  Father Sam was sitting in a battered cardtable chair, a battered Episcopal priest.  Being who he was, he didn't say to me: you're late, you missed the service.  No.  He said: I'm so happy to see you!

*

Jorge: Bricks

*

In this dream love was required. We all love here. The chaste kiss of peace.

The center of the Eucharist had become the moment of peace. This "moment" lasted for some minutes.

J began to panic. Did he love enough? Probably not. So would they notice?

Would they expel him from the sanctuary for the inadequate quantity of his love? Would everybody horribly try to repair him?

Was the love nothing but a disguised form of fear?

At the Thanksgiving dinner he'd attended a few weeks before, every single person in the act of expressing thanks had broken down into tears, except for himself. He had spoken but tears had not come.

A certain joy for him had been present but it had been dry.

I felt my mind wandering during the group prayers so I went into the parish hall bathroom. My absence so to speak wasn't alone -- there were lots of people in the hall. Preparing food. Acting out in the youth group. A few of the homeless lingering around the buffet and so they well might. I at least understood them. I understood a thing like need but love had me baffled. At least in dreamland it did.

Like a legalist trying to earn points I opened the closet to put out the necessary chairs for hospitality, but the closet had been bricked over by the new rector. The bricks wouldn't move. Then I heard the organ behind me and it seemed so far away, also somehow bricked off.

Yet I knew there was a way through those bricks if I could only figure it out. Most likely there was a breath of air reaching me through the impasse, like a winding clew. If I thus were to narrow my shoulder, and subsequently stand sideways, I might well squeeze myself through as if by a thought. And on the other side of the bricks, down a ramp of musty stairs, I did find a few of the chairs in a circle with men (only men) sitting in them. It was the other church, the secret church inside. These were 2 churches that did not so much share a building as in some arcane way hold a common interest in the space intervening between them, which I at least was finding irreversible -- that is, I could not back up. And the secret minister ordered me to sit down and so I did.

Who are you guys? I asked and they said: the men's group. J shifted with all the more discomfort in his chair for considering that he hadn't even sat there long enough to feel comfortable or not. The truth was that he detested and feared groups of men ("gangs!"). . And these guys were uglier than was possible, their ugliness was even multiplied by quantity and proximity. Not the sort to cry at a meal.

Oh give it up, J, give them a break. Soften your heart, it's the Eucharist. I needed to relax and soften. This was feeling like my dream of last night (? was it last night?) I think last night (?) when I found myself walking by the park on a windy night and watching the shadows of the walnut leaves -- just barely hanging on -- as they shook under the electric light -- and wherever a shadow touched the ground a bit of a pothole would open up -- so that walking became impossible, you had to dance and shimmy just to get down the street. And that was the way the women walked as they brought the bread in. Each one mincing like a waitress in the 50s or a reformed cabaret dancer. When they set the gifts down the men dug in. I held my own morsel like an idiot. Ever wanting to feel. To feel to feel. To be a part of reality, not a show. Then came the wine, maybe juice, and the girls danced right in, faces frozen in scowls. Oddly fetching or retching. I felt my stomach turn over and thought of the dancing walnuts. No that wasn't last night. I was mistaken, that was tonight -- had happened tonight. So this was the clew I had been craving: this very moment was constructed of dream, was not real. Oh, thank heaven.

Lord, you said that your gifts were given to "many" and you probably meant to "all" -- which is one reason we follow you, because in fact we feel compelled to be that "all" -- but the gifts must remain gifts, after all -- desired -- not just slabs of bread -- or no one will even take the trouble to receive them -- and it doesn't matter what people should do, since ultimately they will do what they will do, not what they should -- and the "many" will turn into "few" or "none" if no gift is there. But also what happens if it seems the gift has no one to receive? No one worthy?

So J stood up and walked into the kitchen where the women were working. Somehow it was steps taken down into the kitchen. He felt like a character in the Jules Verne novel, moving deeper and deeper, together with James Mason, Arlene Dahl, Diane Baker and Pat Boone. Since it was a dream, he didn't worry about this.

Behind him the minister was intoning the prayers of the people and his voice was made of "nose". It was a voice with a lot of nose. The spirit was buried in a fussiness like tissue. Then the room rocked like a boat and you could hear engines turn on. The women all looked up from their kitchen work and said: you can't be in here. The head of the kitchen crew pointed to a staircase leading down into daylight. Meanwhile J saw with astonishment the chairs. There were at least a million chairs, waiting for someone to come in and sit down. But no doubt people were too scared to enter this place where after all they were not allowed.

I had had enough of this dream. It seemed to me that I was dreaming a dream that had no place for me and that that would be the meaning of the dream when it eventually crystallized in the following day's fresh air. Because outside in the daylight I saw the people from my own church now leaving -- and they greeted me with love -- with that love that was so overwhelming for me -- but at the same time they hadn't noticed that I'd been absent. So the love was real but the object of the love -- myself -- had been placed off-station or misprinted with a smear or was not answering the phone. If this love had been thrown like a brick no one had been able to catch it even as a concussion. Did that matter? I felt the way I so often felt after "church" -- that I had nodded off and missed my exit. I hadn't been paying attention! I had just been dreaming!

But when I woke up it wasn't even Sunday. I was on a pier that was separated from its marshland train-tracks by some unexplained gap. The trick was to get my suitcase off the pier and onto the train without getting either it or myself wet. This would be enough to take my mind off the strange and unsatisfying topic of human worship. Behind me a woman's voice continually scolded me to hurry up. Her voice was notably bereft of love. She didn't care if I lived or died. So this was more like the sort of reality in which, for better or worse, our lives actually occur. At least within this indifference I would be able to spend a little time figuring out just what my dreaming offered in the way of prophecy -- just what it was it sensed was coming for me. Because I have noticed -- and hope that you too will ponder -- how insistently dreams present themselves not (as people once mistakenly thought) as interpretations of the past but as most entirely -- in every detail really -- about the things that are to come, which they play as great a part in being as in speaking. And this is the source of their insistence and their fear.

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