dream Archives

Dream Melt

From the last ice age.

the imagination is where it rains paint onto frescoes
of figures to crowd the divine comedy clubs where we
come and go every evening, no ID, no cover at the door

carrying our huddled masses of memory on backs
crunching shells of peanuts and empires on the floor
the strobe light pulsars keeping time with unborn stars

first wears the crown––it is the chicken or the egg,
but who can say is on the mic now, to proclaim
in a language unknown to whomever has ears

no tears need translation and what is the time?
it is lost and what is the point? only a moment
and where did it begin? in the beginning

was the word and the word rained down where
we gathered here to catch it back to the mouths
of us speaking all at once in the land where

the constant rain is coming
from the vision at the bottom
of the iceberg where it

melts

You can put a question to it, define some central arc. With a working x-ray, you can find the skeleton, hold it up. Strange balloon, there is something beyond these, a milder sun to know you whole and mirrored in its sky. Don’t fly to it yet, love, it is not yet time to know the altitude of that dormant mountain you’ve selected as central metaphor. Wait. You may find that instead of a symphonic saving it means some other mischief, that it proves a certain madness you only suspected was yours when you chose to suspect you were only dreaming too hard, chasing some symbol to seal this torment shut. Where was the white rose, the singing bird, the rest at the end of your long nights of questions? O wild spider, no one hears you cry. Lacking tears, you seem only ever to make more spiders. There they go again, animating shadows. Look.

What Passes

Still life with axial shift.

Something low and lithe creeps around the edges of a dream that has me pushing hands away so I can get my face into breathable air. A passing thing, it leaves the lasting mark of its metaphor, this lens. It won’t be replaced. Like that, the body told back to its life, her silenced hunger now a howl. What blessing can hold at a table like this, quaking above the groan of this rumbling earth? One of us notices. The other is primed to accept whatever comes as naturally granted, another gift for losing before it is opened. There is no sense to what is shown with no figuring and nothing to explain. Nothing, I will say, if anyone asks. Go back to sleep.

Variabilities

Of similar forms.

Considering the history of a given set of bodies, the artist posed a question. Where are the bones of the bones? she asked us, and we knew our nakedness an extension of a larger shadow, casting us out. Once in it, we danced something more than imitation. The camel’s eye our needle, we stitched our skeletons into new visions of before to scatter our tomorrows until we lost their tracks and had to make them new again.

***

Inspired by the work of Nancy Graves.

In Luminous Exile

For Delmore Schwartz.

If time was the fire, you entered barefoot and unmasked to spin within its heat, collecting what you could until it was time to march again. You stepped from it and promised to return, bending low to gather the fathers you carried on your back.

You dreamed of warm houses in winter. Your dream had humor, then its genius thickened. You bloomed into ruin, the heavy bear. And yet.

Somehow, sparks from the fire you absorbed continued to flicker after your lonely death, and other strangers––heaving, heavy bears, baring ourselves––marching long nights with the weight of dead fathers on our backs, would see it, and keep on.

***

Inspired by the life, work (and untimely death) of Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966).

Ordinary Noise

The role of contrasting elements.

In art, dreams are realized––and the worst, not to be measured or weighted, but lived. Counting may follow, anguished measurements in the unflinching face of midday, when anyone with living ties to memory is susceptible to affliction by the pretense that all is well and as it seems, amid the noise of countless machines, distracting from a vast hum in the background.

This is why mornings and evenings are so much kinder, because the dominant noises are more obviously birds, revelers, and other wild sounds, none of which pretend any allegiance to standardized notions of good sense, which routinely kill without making any noise beyond those that have become so ordinary and expected, they may easily go unheard.

Interested Party

Notes on the hero artist.

We who knew him called him friend, and we did this with relief, in celebration. Look, we were saying, there are still some who make their own rules. It is still possible to live a dream.

No, he would say, it is not possible. Only necessary. As he saw it, this was the point.

Why would he spend so long, some wondered, in certain conversations? We could not pull him away, and all he had to say for himself was, it was all so interesting.

***

Adapted from comments made by Betsy Sussler in celebration of the life of Michael Goldberg, appearing in BOMB’s Summer 2008 feature, In Memoriam: Michael Goldberg.

Out of Sight

With Italo Calvino.

The cities were born a little at a time––not unlike poems, you said––of various inspirations. You had a habit of collecting odd strangers and mythical heroes, and notes on places that you had been, might be, would tend to imagine. What happened was not a book exactly, but a geography to move in. You mapped cities of memory, cities of desire, cities and signs. There were continuous cities and hidden cities. These cities were braided: cobweb cities across an abyss, a microscopic city, spreading.

Watch that one, you said, and as it grew, it revealed concentric cities like tree rings. Sometimes, you said, you would come across a city that would write itself.

Into what? We wondered, and you said yes.

***

Inspired by Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in honor of his birthday.

Dead Teachers

First lessons in deep time.

Look at you, powerful danger, witness to our end and our continuance. Cipher of memory, speak into the borders of this condition.

The first body––of nature, will vanish soon. But the second goes slowly. A creature of culture does not exit so quickly from its binding web. There are decisions to make about the coming journey, and in these we find fiber enough to weave the net.

We ease them gently from us and continue to invite them back. We live with them, and they know us. Gone is too easy a word; if it were complete, wouldn’t the loss have less weight?

This is something else, a presence without assurance, a radical rupture, reminding what the soil takes back. No, we have never been clean.

But if not gone, then where? Here is the beginning of hope, thirteen ways of looking at a moldering body. What else could it be, these first lessons in seeing the invisible?

***

I was considering the presence of deep time in the work of artist Alfredo Arreguin when I came across a Social Research article by Thomas W. Laqueur called “The Deep Time of The Dead,” which inspired this post.

The Dreamers

On myth and memory.

Unless the sky falls to the earth, unless the forest up and moves, unless the seas should empty themselves of all depths, would you clip the lawless wings of imagination’s first flight, to sacrifice its range and its wild for the sake of having its reliable presence near the dinner table and along these streets?

We loved mystery before beauty and the unseen lurkers terrified us to ecstasies with their tickling whispers.

It’s hard not to miss the irresponsible charm of the old gods, who in their airy innocence seemed only to care about getting what they wanted, whose flaming passions lit the sunset skies, who would rear a starling from scratch and teach her to speak, so that she might announce our secreted dreams back to us, exposing our still-feral hopes, the directionless expanse of their vicious hunger, creeping where we could not dare to look.

Tag: dream