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.