Dream as a Metaphor of Survival

Come to think of it, the world has taken me out of context — physically, mentally, and spiritually. There is a not quite comic schism inherent in the idea that on a daily basis the New York Times and “All Things Considered” tell us everything that is happening in the world, but neglect to include how we are to endure this information. If I had not learned to find solace in the most ordinary preoccupations—cooking, the forest and desert —my perceptions and vices by now would have driven me to madness or death. In fact, they very nearly did.

It should be understood at the outset that a poet's work (like that of an analyst) frequently parodies his or her best intentions. The following is decidedly “creationist” rather than informed, bearing up as it does under the burden of a mind that creates its living out of a perceptual overload, rather than a gift for drawing conclusions. As an instance, the memory of a mother's angry slap quite naturally suggests the flour on her hand: she was making bread and I was eight. I said I didn't eat the seven Heath candy bars in the pantry though the wrappers were under my bed and I didn't break the hen's eggs against the silo. Sent to my room I crawled out the window never to return and found Lila. We lay down on the wood bridge and tried to count fish but they kept moving in the green water. I felt my face where mother slapped me. I sat up and looked at the back of Lila's knee. She said “thirty-three” when I looked up the back of her blue skirt to where her underpants drew up into the crack of her butt. Lila didn't mind my injured eye because her dad had been shot in the war and maybe he had been shot right through the eye, she said. The girl who cut my eye moved away. I got back through the window just before I was called to dinner, a