So,
my wheat dreams, you see, are all muddled up. Life, art, fantasy.
Past, ghosts of, and sometimes ghosts to come: those I have not yet
met and may not ever if instead I take a different course and so
paths don't cross. They are then just a dream face who bear no
resemblance to anyone I know nor anyone I've seen who will quickly
fade and be forgot for there will be no life trigger.
Faces
from the distant past though are unnerving. Why are you visiting me?
Why now? And why not ever on a non-wheat night when my last meal
hasn't been inspired by the Italians or accompanied with bread? If
they came on such a night I might be able, in my sleep, to stick with
the vision and not instead have many successive broken dreams. With
no beginnings, no endings, just middles. Unsatisfactory middles.
What? Who? Where? Abstract and cubist-like. Where my inward eye
struggles to adjust to these shapes within shapes, shapes over
shapes, shapes concealing, hiding what they most want me to see.
Hard, sharp, no softness, no rounded edges, just distortion. The eye
has entered a less friendly Mr. Men and Little Miss land. A country
filled with painting upon painting by Franz Marc or August Macke. The
seen and the unseen. A town of bowler hats and men raining from the
skies with apples as faces. I've poured over too much Magritte. Eaten
bread with my cheese and then looked some more, and seen Napoleon,
standing, with his back to me, looking out to sea. I know it's
Bonaparte and yet his back looks nothing like I imagined. I want to
laugh at his stature.
And
then I wake, I drift. I toss and turn. I mumble or cry out. The
darkness has turned grey, dark grey...I'm pulled under.
I'm
in a bar, there's a sparrow sipping from a glass. He flies to his
master and deposits amber liquid into his mouth. Now it's night and
I'm outside where a man is standing on a roof and wailing his lungs
out, wails to scare those within as if he were Hamlet's father. His
son does not come to meet him.
I
wake...I speak, eyes shut: There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' Whence has that come
from? These lines are not in Lamb's prose version. I shouldn't know
them. Who is speaking through my mouth? The great man himself? Is he
in the room?
I
peek...it's dove grey. Night has been pushed further away, but it's
not time yet to welcome day. A new day. I turn over.
And
in my dose see a figure I take to be a young Laurie Lee walking,
walking, walking under a blazing sun. I have gone back in time, to a
time when I wasn't a thought; my parents weren't either. The
imagination is strong, as strong as a midday sun.
Who's
this approaching? A reverend with a camera, or a nun? No, it's a
woman cloaked in black and it's me that's approaching her, not her
me, for she leans against a whitewashed stone villa, her gaze
elsewhere and her face a wise but dry cracked mask. She puts a finger
to her lips; who is she silencing? Bewildered I look away, down at my
feet, where there's a pregnant black cat (her familiar?) winding,
winding itself around my legs. I look up, the woman is gone, but the
sun, the sun is beating.
The
light is gold, a white-gold, a gold-white. Day must follow night. The
wheat has been gathered in.
Picture credit: The Gleaners, 1889, Camille Pissaro (source: WikiArt).
This post was written in 2019.
