DREAMS AND SLEEPLESSNESS

I am on Santa Barbara island, alone. 40 miles from the California coast, fog blows over the far brown hill, trundles silently through the giant coreopsis groves, past my stiff hair and to the sea. Sometimes the sun, wherever it is, kindles a pink effulgence in the east. The sea lions wail and bellow in the wombish light. I hear the waves crash hundreds of feet below from my cradle in the precipitous basalt. It holds me, not in darkness, but in a sort of hallucinogenic ambiguity. I live in myself and sometimes in this little room, cut from a midcentury catalog.

Could not sleep. The dull glow rushed through the window in the night and woke me. I had been dreaming of her in the endless Annapolis shadows. A one time salvation and rival, and of course much more than I have ever been able to express. Coming, going, like the swell against the rocks down below.

Now she flies about the desert, the scorching unseeable. I felt her leave the ground... I felt her leave me, and so I dreamed of her staring into my eyes in the market at dusk. We looked into one another as lightning sees its path through the air.