dream before waking

i am helping Barbara to pack for her trip but we are not at her house and it has to be some kind of dorm room because if it’s a hotel room it’s the bleakest one i have ever seen and it echoes too much.

there are a bunch of papers in the corner, and a smashed cigar butt.

“must have been some party”, i tell her.
“must be (proper name)’s.” she says.

in the papers are a colored-pencil drawing of a dragonfly and a stack of photographs. They’re taken in ford hall, in the terraces, other places i do not recgnize. susan and jen are there and heather wearing the beer-soaked sheet from the toga party we had to go to to be polite and linda and ilona and guys who took to signing their full names to correspondence with a silly nickname inserted in quotes between the middle initial and the last name: david c. “bink” stickley. mister michael “moose” moren.

sarah is there, too, and smiling broadly. if you peel back the edges of the photographs the people in them become more and more real; they talk and laugh and sing and as you look at them, you do too whether you were there or not because you have peeled back the corner and gotten in.

and i am running along a road in the lakes region of new hampshire in the snow wearing only a blanket over my back like a cape and it is COLD as i skate along the ice in my bear feet.


i actually have claws and fur.

and i leave the road and go chrging up a hill into the snow, running from something, looking for something

but then i’m in a classroom, in the second row from the left and i have all kinds of papers around me and the teacher is very young. he’s tall and red-headed and smiles a lot as if he knows something no oe else does, and he’s probably right.

it is a first class, and he wants us to write something.

what?

anything. just write. but i’m looking around and seeing who’s there: Barbara is there; she is already busy writing. so is Shavar, who is next to me. Erin, who i haven’t seen in years is there, and she looks no older than she did when i knew her. Kathleen, apparently back from the dead, is writing thoughtfuly.

and i can’t find my paper. there is’t any more blank paper on the desk where the young teacher handed out supplies, so i go looking around the room in the various trays and such. i’m very speedy and flit like a bird or a fly from cupboard to shelf to cupboard and eventually when the young man comes over to find the white lined paper for me, the other students swarm over to get papar, too.

“aha”, i laugh. "all of a sudden you realize you need paper? after i did all the searching?”

and they all laugh too and i take my paper back to my desk and i begin to write this.