Dreams We Dream By Day

Been reading again pages 89 - 100, the sensual perceptions of Mali, Fenton, and Uncle: Soliloquy to the spot. Salt, Water, Goa, "Made In Pakistan". And, paper levee, prayer on a strand, blowfish ready to explode "some bath of love", finger in the sky, grave of snow and cup-shaped heart. . . snow tea, turned boat/dog/genital. . . evaporating points "where we both meet"; monastic in seagrass, minstrel as choreography's wide-eyed nurse, canopy of shaven trees, fingers--pencils, coastal Oslo in the hand, Beckett & Gleam' in Fenton's dream, Falstaff and Gogos, and thankfully the entering of Ben Yuzaf. 131 - 140. I wonder, now: are Fenton and Sandy the "dreamers" and Uncle and Mali are daydreamers? And where, then, does this leave Miles (caught between of course? In Miles to go before he sleeps?). A ripple in the pond, part blackened ice and part black water, seemed like a small bird caught there--one wing frozen, one wing flapping--but when I leave the table to look from standing it's nothing but sky & cloud & stiff glinting branch waving high above, in its reflection. This seems to me the sort of thing Uncle would have seen, and Fenton and the others would have learned to--and felt no rush to do otherwise. Yet feeling rush, feeling the second hand from the clock on the kitchen wall unmistakable and caught in his left ear, feeling a slight heave and slug--to the same timing--from the organ that is the essential machine keeping him going, the small bird or several birds--four, say--that now lurch almost puppet-like (but realer, mortal and conscious) from a fluid and muscled nest below a breast pocket. Maybe this is why still photography has no words. Or, until such things are opened. Layers come out. And we taste them, we want to, the individual words together make good soil for the plant of being.