Monday, February 28, 2005

For days now, weeks maybe, I sleep falling early and fast and deep and dreaming wildly and incoherently all the night, it seems, and awaken precisely at 7am (except for twice when I awoke at 6)

and it feels very strange

and it feels as if I'm in an accelerating phase of synaptic recovery, that the little guys are in there every night with hammers and spanners and instruments of construction putting me back together after years of insufferable stress and insomnia had rubbed me down to a nub. I'm less able to find a thread or trail through my dreams now

just vivid pop-ups, imagery, scenes--a beautiful plump 8-month-old baby I left to be babysat--covered with a blanket on the big bed as she went so easily to sleep. There was a hummingbird, on the floor an injured hummingbird, my bloody hummingbird, and there was somewhere a pig, as well.

and a place where market bazaars are held every day, three of them spaced miles apart held in succession, and the women decorated the booths with bundles of flowers each morning, and this one morning I was given that task, but there were no flowers to be had. I went from one home to the next, all the middle-aged housewives' places, and found bowls and pots of limp maroon and pink petunias and nothing I could bring back. But my own flowers, grand they were, if few, and I cut them all and laid them in a box--sturdy wands covered full in snapdragons yellow and orange and red, the colors and shape of the Rocket Pop ices we sucked on as kids. And I showed them to the supervisor woman, who dismissed them impatiently. And rolling her eyes demanded I go to her house and fetch some real flowers, for she had plenty. I was crushed, for I knew mine were very beautiful, and I didn't get why she didn't see that.

and freeways, lots of freeways, overpasses, cloverleafs, on-ramps and exits. At one place a crowd queued to enter the gateway on foot; at another, a crowd queued to exit. Metal bars and barriers. At the exit I stood with three men. One a Keanu-like movie star, the other the postman from Cheers (Cliff--oh I have a real-life friend who stood at the edge of a cliff), and a Clinton who kept cornering girls in a closet.

and a dwelling place, a city even, undiscovered by anyone it was so remote at the top of a cliff, bottomless gorge below, where beautiful golden structures housed a woman who was perfection and completeness and all love. And the Clinton paying truckloads of rough uncut diamonds--freight cars full, he had a limitless supply--to find a way there.

All night the pinball of my awarenesses springing away from one elastic scenario to the next until it found the narrowing chute to the recycling exit of my waking self.

11:06:57 AM    comment []