Three Ruffled Sleeves

I wake at seven am on a Sunday, with little internet, but a dream lodged in my brain – a network of dreams, the purposive structures of the mind’s vague brilliance, its idiom of radiance, lost interminably in dialogues of self-analysis. The vacant door, the tower shadow, etc.

In the first dream, a movie star hearthrob clutches his arms around me in the doorway of my building, and then strips his shirt to show his alabaster abdomen and pecs. But the dream’s whammy pedal has been hit, and his body and face suddenly distort, instantly, without lying. He’s no longer an icon. He’s no longer beautiful. He’s suddenly heavy, and his face has aging scars, his waist stretch marks. (As he flexes nude, I can see his right arm is totally distorted: the muscles are red-raw and throbbing; there’s something infected and deteriorating about his whole arm. The chicken bones of his muscles stick out; the red endless rings of tissue are hot auburn and orange and sickly.) What’s worse is his personality: oblique but blunt, forceful and toxically attached. He forces his way into my bed and holds me down and just apelike holds me. Then an avenger comes in and locks him out. And he’s scrambling outside the door, and the dream changes.

In the second panel of images, I’m coasting and scattered with the breeze enjoyably over the groins of a hillside. The trees have Indians, and little delicate warriors in the bushes. All benign. A friend is there coasting like a plane, and is to be avoided. A series of people I know circulate around a bike path, coupled on a red path, like famous entertainers gearing up to enter Noah’s Ark. Then I disappear, and I’m in the bowels of a large white polyester-walled department store. (One from my childhood, I remember, in North Brunswick that used to be called Caldor, declaring bankruptcy in 1995 and closing all stores in 1999.) Lounging in the isles of this newly-furnished store, I enjoy the lazy idle wandering of browsing but not shopping, of looking but seeing nothing, of not absorbing the white but being absorbed by it. Idioretnal lamps, bleak ceilings, ashtray registers. Then a woman at the Help Desk eyes me up and I nervously ask for some books I know she couldn’t own, or couldn’t find, or couldn’t whatever. “Elizabeth Bishop,” I say. And she grins and plunks on her keyboard virtuoso-like and is calm and jittery in departmental rag clothes. “Yes, yes, now wait a minute, wait a minute.” And from her pockets she pulls out two rare vintage volumes of Bishop that resemble the little series of anthologies of English literature that Auden did for Viking or some other publisher many many years ago. Both books are identical copies of each other. “Which copy would you like?” she drawls with a souvenir smile. Both are Bishop’s translations of Helena Morley, the young Brazilian diarist who died young but left a supposed classic of Portugese letters.

In the final inner triptych, I’m in an apartment building that is also a school gynasium that is also a large chamber pot of corridors and park benches. I’m moving from tight space to tight space (pleasurably) (also frustratedly), and finally have set up in a small container booth a projection screen and feeder to display various lewd pornographic images (for my own private viewing pleasure). But the circus of people in the gym outside the hatch door causes me to scramble and find another stowaway spot (this all feels like being onboard a large seaworthy maiden vessel). Knock knock. The heavy circular door shuts without a chink. Setting up the projector isn’t going well; the settings are backwards; the streaming blue light of dust doesn’t cohere into the cut-out circus shapes I so desire. Knock knock. Different teachers from my recent life are on the other side of the door. The Russian. The Englishman. Even Frances. A whole assembly hall that announces my name. I sputter out on my heels and keep slipping sideways to the ground and quickly slip (in reverse re-wind effect) back up to my feet. Once again they mention my name. A large piece of ribboned paper with various inscrutable figures and designs is straightaway presented. I walk around the gym and the crowds are emphatic. I am swollen with pride and deference. I move to the appropriate seat for exit. The next name is called. “Sarah Whitmore.” And then I shout, “All hail Sarah Whitmore!” Strange, eh? I don’t think it was a Nazi rally, but who knows while inside the flushing sleeping colors of a dream. “All Hail!” “All Hail, etc.!” The shouts and chants and bursts of thunderous applause are unstoppable. Everyone repeats the new mantra. Sarah pops up in her smart Prince Harry outfit and moves gladfully to the isle to pick up her locust-winged diploma. Later, in the disconnected aftermath of the gym awards show (which has the post-hush of a ended coronal), she takes me aside and says “Did you hear the one person who was saying instead ‘All hail the tan of Sarah of Whitmore?” I look at her. She might look tanned. She is tanned. Or maybe not. “It was me, Sarah," I confess. She pauses. Looks back with suppressed grin. “No it wasn’t. It was me.”

And then I wake.