I had one of those nights so full of dreaming I seemed to live in two worlds at once. To move between them I only had to close my eyes or open them. I wasn’t sleeping, but off visiting, and the places I visited were horrible, but when I woke up I still felt as though I’d woken up in the wrong world. My mood and my talents felt better suited to a world of stuck elevators and crumbling labyrinthine apartment buildings and cats in danger. I still feel that way, even after eating a bagel with cream cheese.
I won’t say too much more about my dreams. A friend made me laugh the other day by pointing out that the world’s most boring conversation would be between the person talking about his novel and the person talking about her therapy, and that we were in fact having that conversation. Or the other way around. Anyway, the fog has mostly burned off by now and there’s nothing outside that should make me feel so haunted and cowed, and nothing inside, either, but a bunch of sleeping carnivores who dream only of victory. Still, I’ve spent most of the day so far looking for something that captures the dread mixed with dorkiness that is so often the residue of dreams. (The imperiled cats were wearing high heels. I was wearing a pink satin dress.)
I read some Sappho, but turns out she is not remotely dorky. I read Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions and found the perfect thing, except also not dorky and possibly requiring permissions. I read the Swedish folk tale Nail Soup, which almost cheered me up, and the Grimm’s story Jorinda and Joringel, which creeped me out and cheered me up. And then I found him. Say what you will, I will always love him. Here you go.
Spring and Death
I had a dream. A wondrous thing:
It seem’d an evening in the Spring:
–A little sickness in the air
From too much fragrance everywhere: –
As I walk’d a stilly wood,
Sudden, Death before me stood:
In a hollow lush and damp,
He seem’d a dismal mirky stamp
On the flowers that were seen
His charnelhouse-grate ribs between,
And with coffin-black he barr’d the green.
‘Death,’ said I, ‘what do you here
At this Spring season of the year?’
‘I mark the flowers ere the prime
Which I may tell at Autumn-time.’
Ere I had further question made
Death was vanish’d from the glade.
Then I saw that he had bound
Many trees and flowers round
With a subtle web of black,
And that such a sable track
Lay along the grasses green
From the spot where he had been.
But the Spring-tide pass’d the same;
Summer was as full of flame;
Autumn-time no earlier came.
And the flowers that he had tied,
As I mark’d not always died
Sooner than their mates; and yet
Their fall was fuller of regret:
It seem’d so hard and dismal thing,
Death, to mark them in the Spring.
–Gerard Manley Hopkins
And, ok, here’s the poem from Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions by Maurice Manning. I hope it’s ok to reproduce it. I love this poem. I love this whole book, which really is a book, as in a story or a novel, not only a collection of poems.
Raptor
The mother lets loose a lead sigh, Lord Ham
Ercy is it ever hot in that kitchen! and the family
bows to bless the food and the gentle hands
that prepared it. Everything could suddenly
turn harmonious, but Booth cracks one eyelid
and sneaks a peek at Mad Daddy, staring at a wild-
life watercolor of a hawk perched on a fencepost,
pecking through a fresh kill. Three feathered
strains of beauty fly circles in the boy’s heart.
One, the image of the hawk itself, a red-tailed
parcel of perfect pitch. Two, the smell
of the father pretending to be
a steel-eyed radius. Three, a terrible
Presence flapping around the room.
