I received in the week's mail wonderful used books I ordered with my Christmas gift-certificate from faraway sister-in-law--Kerouac's collected letters in hardcover, two volumes, and Milan Kundera Art of the Novel and Kafka's diaries in paperback. I have to keep my head in it to keep going, in the cloud of words to remember.

My sculptor friend from Yolo (down in the valley near Sacramento) phoned to say he is bringing me an old trailer to park out back and write in. Long all-day drive up a mountain to gift me this miracle. Just like that. Oh that white-light meditation. It knows just what to do.

" ... The philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz developed a theory to explain how outer events in our lives coincide with our inner development in a grand expression of 'pre-established harmony.'" -- Ray Grasse, Waking Dream

It's the eleventh hour of evening on the anniversary of the day of my birth, 27 December, when my mother bore me forth on a gurney in the Berkeley Medical Center assisted by a military doctor, she--my mother--only 19 and my 19-year-old sailor dad pacing in the waiting room or wherever it was men paced back then.

This day my birthday morning I lucked into the vein of my book and caught in the current flowed forth for hours. High with it, and happy.

[from journal of 30 November 2011]

Because the house is small and all the walls are partial, the activities of each of its three inhabitants are clearly audible to the others at all times. This necessitates a stratagem: headphones. We are a Headphones Household. My brother at the kitchen table traces his stencil alphabets and works wearing headphones plugged into a radio tuned to a Golden Oldies frequency. Husband wears headphones to shield me from the noise of the thoroughbred racing he watches on TV. I wear headphones playing iPod ambient sounds to cover my brother's whispered mutterings, which irritate me.

Yet sound is my stock in trade, so to speak. With my headphones on I do not hear the cats racing up and down the stairs or the clacking of my mate's keyboard as he chats with Facebook friends. I cannot hear my old terrier's thin wheezes and snores from where she sleeps at the foot of my workbed. I cannot hear the bleats and squawks of the lovebirds in their kitchen cage (which annoy my brother so, even through his headphones, and which make him mutter and curse). It makes me sad to shut myself off from the world's sounds in this way. My headphones are plugged into my iPod, and I listen to ambient music or noise-blocking sounds such as rainfall or ocean surf or even sometimes the recorded low roar of a gas furnace--most effective for meditation.

So much of my written work springs from auditory stimulation. "Silence"--the open untrammeled waves of household air. The small ambient components of quotidian quiet.

This tells me more than anything how badly I need a small writing shack to work in, so I can celebrate again the music the world makes.

Like Huckleberry Finn, I feel, by my closed winterwindow.

... I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn't no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, a way off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldn't make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. ... Well, after a long time I heard the clock way off in the town go boom--boom--boom--twelve licks; and all still again--stiller than ever. Pretty soon I heard a twig snap down in the dark amongst the trees--something was a stirring. I set still and listened. Directly I could just barely hear a "me-yow! me-yow!" down there. That was good! Says I, "me-yow! me-yow!" as soft as I could, and then I put out the light and scrambled down to the ground and crawled in among the trees, and sure enough, there was Tom Sawyer waiting for me.

With these headphone sounds blotting out the music of the world, I might very well miss Tom when he comes to fetch me.

So I move within deep and deeper. Will that world offer its own soundtrack? Will I be able to hear it there? I must listen hard.

Out the window--wind's up. Unsettled weather. Overcast moving past. Tree tops swaying. Naked poplars and pines in their thick black coats leaning southward and then springing back north; lower limbs shimmy and twist, excited.

Enough of writing, though I could go on all day today, I think. Please may I have a trailer to write in? What can I give you?

Time for errands.

I miss your company.

In memoriam:

"Life cannot be destroyed for good. A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy crust of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undermining it. It may be a long process, but one day it has to happen: the crust can no longer hold and starts to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something new and unique. ... History again demands to be heard."
                     Vaclav Havel, letter 8 April 1975, in Disturbing the Peace

***
Look at the wonderful universe I have made--the cat's rear foot--exquisite! Every delicate bone and tendon, gleam of skylight off fine white fur, long toes, invert teardrop of the long muscular haunch--what an amazing mind I have even to conceive it! And more--the vivid multiplicity of jellyfish, alien patiences in the crocodile's metallic gaze, Out the window here, the sodden frostbit yard so naked and drear in its season. I have an eye for balance.

Various nature's hysterical thrill, the manic impossible perfection of it, and in the balance, menaces of imminent catastrophe--anxiety of armaments encroaching, persistence of the poisoner to nullify and pollute--I made that, too.

I change my mind. I take it back. And also misery and lovelessness and hard isolation.

Return me now to the Good World, Dreammaker. Shift me back, please, to the glowgolden year of my familyheart embracing and longlaughter playing baseball in the rain, in the weedy ravine, with wine and bodylove in damp poetry evenings.

No dream again this morning, but husband, who must take so many pills each night to guarantee sleep that dreams are very rare, bounded out of his room for 8 a.m. coffee with a vivid dream I'll relate instead because I find it so lovely and flattering overall.

He and I sat at the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, a familiar haunt of his when he lived in Chicago many years ago. (In real-life he once had met there the neurolinguistic programmers Bandler and Grinder, he said.)

I sat on the corner stool, his favorite spot back in the day, when he was a hot horseplayer and dandy. He sat on the stool next to me. He wore a custom white-on-white shirt with French cuffs and diamond cufflinks, a necktie of purples and pinkish lavenders that looked mauve from a distance, custom-made wool worsted pants with a European cut that flared just a little over the tops of his Bally loafers. Cashmere sport coat under a cashmere overcoat ("The way I used to dress, actually"). He felt but did not see a discreet gold bracelet around his left wrist.

My costume was fine in its way: a soft large beret covered in feathers, a feminine white blouse with a subtle geometric pattern--diamonds and the like--just visible in the weave, a plain gray woolen coat with heavy leather frog closures, masculine wool trousers tucked into knee-high lace-up boots, also rather masculine. ("You looked so sexy in those boots," he said.) I wore four heavy rings on my fingers, set with large polished stones in hues of jasper and jade. (The ensemble was distinctly Georgia O'Keefe-ian, he said. I love this outfit, I said. "Well, I'm not gonna dream some shit you don't like," he said.)

We were there for a book signing--I was signing and giving away my book of poems to a crowd of young women and girls aged 12 to 20. He was bored and because I "wouldn't let him" drink he was forced to drink cup after cup of disgusting bar coffee. No more Heinekin-and-Cointreau for him. He was bored and a little resentful. He called a waiter over and ordered a gravy-bowl of ice cream from the kitchen. When it arrived it was some kind of orange sorbet coating over vanilla. (Oh!, I said. That's a Dreamcicle--your dream-maker is having you on. I love it when they do that. "I never heard of a Dreamcicle," he said. Husband is a rum-raisin man when it comes to ice cream.) He ate the ice cream sulkily, blaming me and my "prohibition" of drugs and alcohol (which in truth I never have stated explicitly, but which he infers from all the information I share with him about dopamine and mania and psychosis and the like) for his indulgence in sugar.

The book I signed was poems, the volume about 3/4-inch thick and maybe 5 by 8 inches or a little larger, softbound in ivory-colored vellum with elegant gray-green lettering. The pen I signed with was magical--the words flowed out practically unbidden and the page, when I was done signing, was beautiful. As I handed out the signed volumes I invited the young women to attend a class I was giving on poetry and the music in words. ("Your voice was particularly exquisite," he said. "And you know, voice is a 5th-chakra deal--knowledge and truth among other things. Your voice is a big part of why I'm so crazy about you.")

After the signing I took him down some stairs to "the Museum of Science and Industry," I said, although what we found there when we arrived was a huge reconstructed dinosaur skeleton--more of natural history thing.

The dream had an aching quality to it, a yearning, he said. We didn't have to ask what anything cost--the taxis, the clothes and restaurants--"There was a "distinct flavor of cultural hedonism."

"But then," he said, "you dragged me to the fuckin' museum."

Back brace off. Careful. Don't flex. Don't stretch--don't now.

I was dreaming. There were grass and hills, walking and running.

Oh there was a shop, a gift purchased.

Was there a dog? I think so.

I remember much talking. A man. Was talking to me.

Turn--slow--and sit up slowly. The house is very cold. Legs over. Stand now. Straighten. Very straight. Slow.

Made it. Spasm week has ended, I think. No more brace. Husband will be disappointed: he liked me with the cinched middle.What was the dream?

Seems like Anthony Hopkins was looking deep in my eyes and lecturing. I remember lectures, classes.

And there was riding about in cars. A convertible full of laughing people. Women with lipstick on, smiling men in shirtsleeves and dark oiled hair combed back, cracking jokes.

Soothing dreams, then. Compensatory. No real recollection, unless a flash comes later that tears it open so they tumble out again. I slept too hard maybe--sleepless the night before last, last night I crashed early and slept 10 hours straight. Even though I drank plenty of water, on my waking the dreams rushed away with the tide they sailed in on.

I see outdoors through the window streets and lawns and roofs lightly powdered in fresh snow. It will be gone by midday, but it's a pretty sight, with the just-risen sun's yellow light streaming under the loose east edge of the overcast.

Will husband come out? I was hoping not, so I could write awhile before the words in my head get exploded away by someone else's, like bowling pins ... Sometimes they lie in perfect patterns just waiting to be copied down, but even a whisper of "good morning" can shatter them.

Yet I crave his whisper. It's the paradox, the conflict at my center--words or persons? Persons or words?

I don't disturb him. Let him stay awhile in his dark room if he needs to. I've made it through silent breakfast and now I'll head back upstairs to my own bed, to my keyboard under the skylight, under the snow.

Careful, though.

A Tuesday afternoon at the far end of the Big Stall, during which I have had nothing to share with anyone on the page or otherwise.

(Perhaps it's like when you install a new OS and the hard drive is unavailable until after Restart.
            Perhaps it's the Big InStall ...)

Pluto has applied its steady erasure to my natal Sun for several years now, going direct, retrograde, direct, retrograde--steady illness, discord and loss, confrontation, and seed of renewal.

Today I have read one page of Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family ("... I saw mosquito nets stranded in the air like the dresses of hanged brides, the skeletons of beds without their mattresses ..."); one poem in Wislawa Szymborska's Miracle Fair: Selected Poems ("I owe a lot / to those I do not love. / Relief in accepting / others care for them more. / Joy that I am not / wolf to their sheep. ..."); a paragraph of Everywhere Being is Dancing by Robert Bringhurst ("What poetry knows, or what it strives to know, is the dancing at the heart of being ..."); a sentence of that old charlatan Gregg Braden's Walking Between the Worlds ("Recent research by Dan Winter indicates the possibility of a direct relationship between emotion, the location of an antenna [along the double helix of DNA], and whether or not the antenna is turned ON or OFF ..."). Later I'll consume a greater quantity of Subtle Worlds: An Explorer's Field Notes by David Spangler, and perhaps carve out another chapter of Steve Jobs.

I must work today all day. I am powerfully sleepy although I slept soundly for eight hours. Night full of dreams. Excavating And the dream before that? And the one before that? backward into the darkness of forgetting.

I was thinking just now of Burning Man and how the traffic it generates keeps this county alive, passers-through glutting the stations and shops with careless money.

And had the memory of twelve years ago when I drove home with brother Brian from my mother's, our mother's, death in Arizona. I'd waited on her dying at the Copper Queen Hospital, and then seen to her cremation, emptied and cleaned her little rented house in Bisbee, and now I drove the rented minivan packed with what I'd kept, plus brother and two large dogs and the fiberboard box of Mother's ashes, coming into California the back way via the Gerlach highway in Nevada. It was the Sunday night before Labor Day, 11 p.m., and the revelers were pouring out onto the interstate north of Reno from the road to Burning Man in one uninterrupted south-flowing stream of headlights 100 miles from the Black Rock Desert and ours the only vehicle going north. And at Gerlach itself all the vehicles in a clot we penetrated with difficulty nearly bashed by drunken driver swinging into our lane at us. Close call. Burst of adrenalin.

And finally the dark beyond--the wilderness obtained--like pitch, the road bending out of the flat, between low hills crowding the tarmac on either side tight and winding and black, and bottoming from a little rise whoa! slamming on brakes and sliding into a herd of black black cattle standing motionless and asleep on the road. Recovering--more adrenalin--then inching our way among them and finally past. So tired, driving since Las Vegas or maybe Kingman that morning. It was after 1 a.m. and we had to make it home. And finally passing into California on the secret back road and up the unlit valley through the tiny sleeping towns Eagleville and Cedarville, and at our intersection brother B, riding along silent with me the whole time and from half-sleep cries out "We're home!" recognizing the turn. Impressed me. So much more to him than I'll ever know.

And two miles more. And we fall into our little dark house and the orchard around it with its long grass. Fall into our beds so happy from tidying up our mother's death, so grateful to arrive we'd almost forgotten it.

***

Proverb
by Kenneth Koch

Les morts vont vite, the dead go fast, the next day absent!
Et les vivants sont dingues, the living are haywire.
Except for a few who grieve, life rapidly readjusts itself
The milliner trims the hat not thinking of the departed
The horse sweats and throws his stubborn rider to the earth
Uncaring if he has killed him or not
The thrown man rises. But now he knows that he is not going,
Not going fast, though he was close to having been gone.
The day after Caesar’s death, there was a new, bustling Rome
The moment after the racehorse’s death, a new one is sought for the stable
The second after a moth’s death there are one or two hundred other moths
The month after Einstein’s death the earth is inundated with new theories
Biographies are written to cover up the speed with which we go:
No more presence in the bedroom or waiting in the hall
Greeting to say hello with mixed emotions. The dead go quickly
Not knowing why they go or where they go. To die is human,
To come back divine. Roosevelt gives way to Truman
Suddenly in the empty White House a brave new voice resounds
And the wheelchaired captain has crossed the great divide.
Faster than memories, faster than old mythologies, faster than the speediest train.
Alexander of Macedon, on time!
Prudhomme on time, Gorbachev on time, the beloved and the lover on time!
Les morts vont vite. We living stand at the gate
And life goes on.



August 15, 2002

Or probably not. So much resists the pen. So little remains available in words.

Seven years in wilderland suffices. My planets shift from their lengthy retrogrades, groan like great gears braking to change planes, heaving their teeth anotherwise for different angles to engage.

Autumn already is here with its weird light and uncertain airs. I almost can't stand it, the strangeness, when I go out to examine the sweet potato vines and feed the goldfishes and murder the wasps.

That longing that saturates one in the fall. Or maybe only me.

This is the time of great change, now until January. Everything in my life shifts now. All will be magnificent. That much I know.

Yesterday's dreams had me in a lovely great old shabby hotel where hardly anyone lived. My own house stood directly behind it across an alley. I wandered through the hallways and in and out of the rooms. I meant to rent an office there but kept putting it off. I imagined I could not afford the expense. Then a young writer friend from Real Life rented it instead, and it turned out to have been only $20 a month!

This morning's dreams were less vivid, more fantastical. I remember climbing a long narrow ladder from our home (which had no ceilings) up through an opening in the sky to The World Above. A half-dozen or so suited young gentlemen were climbing down to visit my husband at the same time, and I feared they would prevent me from ascending on the narrow ladder. But we passed one another without incident, me clinging just barely to the right-hand vertical as they descended, very high above the earth. At length I climbed out through an opening onto a busy one-way highway several lanes across, and began to walk on the narrow shoulder, against the traffic, which traveled at very high speed.

***

"Read as dream symbols, ordinary occurences yield depths of information and teaching completely unsuspected by the untrained observer" (Ray Grasse, The Waking Dream.

"O Nature and O soul of man; how linked art thine analogies; not the smallest atom exists in matter that does not have its cunning duplicate in mind" (Herman Melville, Moby Dick.

***

Watched the fishes eat their breakfast. They are growing fast now, and average probably five inches in length, including their tails. Two graceful white ones, five koi-like mottled orange and white, one black fantail, and one a plain trout shape, bluish-bronze in color and extremely difficult to see. The black one is like a shadow, the bluish one like a ghost. They've become greedy now, and when I drop the flakes on the water they all ascend at once and roil the surface and make faint smacking noises with their tiny gulps.

I pulled and discarded two stiff thorny Scotch thistles almost ready to blossom in the lawn, and plucked three dandelion leaves for my midday tea, and a handful of blades sprouted from millet seeds the wild birds dropped under the feeder, to give to the lovebirds in their cage.

Continuing my new work schedule, which is more relaxed than in careers of yore.
I'm enjoying this project. The language needs a lot of work and that necessitates intense focus--nothing I love more! And the subject matter is dear to my heart; losing myself in it gives me a lot of satisfaction.

The weather continues mild with slight breezes. Even now, at 12:30 in the afternoon, the air through the window is cool and clean. In my 12 years at this altitude this is the first bearable summer. It's perfect for plants. Too bad I haven't more resources to make a yard with. I'm getting to know the weeds rather well, though, and with all my watering more and more species are germinating to bring this gravel plate back to life. Bunchgrasses and pigweed, abundance of wild asters where the drainage is poor. I do pull the sowthistles and skeleton mustard. Sweet clover is working hard to break the hardpan up, but I cut it when it reaches a great size. It smells so wonderful and feeds the compost pile. A little patch of hollyhock came up out of nowhere and I make sure to water it, too. We're unlikely to see flowers from this homely biennial until next year, but I'm flattered the species feels safe enough here to try and make a go of it.

The water I give everything has been fertilized by my nine goldfishes in their trough. After I finish filling and refilling the watering cans there I top off the trough water again with fresh stuff from the hose, and so keep the fishes clean and aerated. Their pond lilies are doing so well this year and have blossomed twice. Their round leaves finally have achieved sufficient size and numbers to shade the fish on hot days in the absence of leafy overhangs (deer kill every little tree I plant). I cover the trough anyway with a scrap of lattice to keep the algae down. The cats love to relax on it in the morning shade from the house and watch the fishes' bright movements through the gaps.

It was 40 years ago today I was married for the first time. We were 18 and living in Estherville, Iowa.

After striking out in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which we'd been told was an "18 state" (not so), we'd hitch-hiked north through Minnesota and then east to Ironwood, Michigan, "Home of the World's Tallest Fibreglas Indian." I wore a red calico granny dress and he wore purple striped bellbottoms and a purple-pinstriped cotton shirt. We exchanged vows in a storefront insurance office; the salesman, who was confined to a wheelchair, was a justice of the peace in his spare time. His small terrier dog never left his side.

The other young couple there, who were virtually identical to us, served as our witnesses, and then we served as theirs, and afterward they gave us a lift west as far as Minneapolis.

One year later we were parents of a newborn baby boy,

and a year after that I stepped off a plane in Los Angeles carrying my one-year-old, and never looked back.

This time of year always has meant new beginnings for me.

Dandelion leaves for winter, and some yarrow leaves, too.

In my last night's dream I was personal assistant to an elderly, besotted Peter O'Toole. I cared for him, guided him home after a day's meandering, put him to bed, and was present just to listen to his stories, which I loved. He was very fond of me. When I lay down with him at night he seemed happy to have me there. He was staying in a great castle comprised of tiny rooms and serpentine hallways. The walls were painted brilliant colors--red and gold and orange--and heaps of colorful clutter lay everywhere. There was a bit about kings, royalty, marble statues, fragments of armor and ornate swords and daggers. He was expected on-set for a film he was in. Even though O'Toole was so very old and so very very drunk we had great fun together out in the world, like children, laughing at our jokes and sneaking in places and playing pranks. As I chauffeured him about I felt pure delight and privilege to be with him as he made a spectacle of himself, and to bask in his seeming affection. But after all it wasn't so deep: when the shoot ended and managers swooped in to take him away he didn't think twice about it or look back at me as they left.

But it was so much fun, so much fun while it lasted.

***

Cool this morning. Only 60 degrees at 9 a.m. This summer has been remarkably cool; we've breached 90 only once or twice, and every night is cold.

Now that I understand my neurology I finally can grasp the root cause of my lifelong dilemma--my longing for the company of others and my inability to cope with their presence. Alone, I diminish and pine, yet I pay for any lengthy social exposure with days spent getting my mind right again. Now I understand the situation I feel better about it. Wistful, but finally accepting. It all comes down to strategizing and balance. Our biweekly Game Days serve me well (even though at four hours they are at least an hour too long).

***

Words erupt at the surface like rising springs. Freshets. The ground of me ruptures with little raptures of clear water from depths repressed/suppressed, pressed and pressured. I love this feeling. I've missed it for years. How shall I shut it off again?

Don't. Don't.

***

Later I'll drive out for errands--we're out of milk and potatoes and low on O.J. I must mail some DVDs to youngerSon and fetch drying baskets from storage. The afternoon's task: pluck a peck of dandelion leaves in the shaded yard east of the house. Snip some yarrow stalks to hang for drying. Maybe comfrey leaves and echinacea blossoms, though I hate to take them, they're so pretty.

I've read about one-quarter now of Weeds, Guardians of the Soil and it delights me to know the sweet clover out back is breaking up the subsoil hardpan with its fierce roots, and the pigweed pulls moisture up along its rootsurfaces from deep down to up top where it nourishes everything around it.

In the dream diary of Graham Greene I read

The waking have one world in common,
but the sleeping turn aside each
into a world of his own.
                  Heraclitus of Ephesus, 500 BC

"There is another side to what we call dreams . . . ," Greene says. "They contain scraps of the future as well as of the past. . . . As I look through the long record of my dreams I note time and again incidents of the Common World that have occurred a few days after the dream." Or in my case decades.

And a little flash just now as I grasp the connection--this is why I am reading these books concurrently. Can you see? Dreams are to waking what weeds are to crops. Dreams open up the hardpan down deep. They make a path for nourishment to rise along. They bring forth moisture during drought and warm the ground in winter.