The Commonwealth beyond the World

Fifteenth of February, 2008, I dream. I am in an old mansion, a larger version of International Co-operative. The entire length and life of State Street is contained along the spiralling staircases of the House, all merchants imbedded in the walls. My own bedroom was (true to life) far up top under the roof. Dim Gothic passages penetrate the walls of my room, like recesses in my mind. Winding through one such passage, hung with clothes, blankets and paintings of the future, I wind up onto the roof itself. I find our fix-it fellow, PB, shovelling debris off the roof. Taking a closer gander, I see that the roof is littered with the flayed flesh of canines. Dog carcasses lie hideless on a high flat range of roof. The flat space ends in sharp angles down to a triangular pit, pointed down. Taking up a shovel, I begin to scoop and arm-shoot the carrion down the slope, filling the defile with flesh. Meanwhile PB examines untouched bones and skulls with an almost too caring fascination.

This dream joins in corroboration with a dream of 2002 in which a black meteor busts through the roof (my ceiling) and sits swart and serene on my bedroom floor in a fragment of broken bookshelves and pulverized plaster. Sunlight streams in. I walk around the stone, touching it. Its girth is greater than the ground of my room.

Then in the winter of 2006 comes a summary vision, the Key to Dreams themselves. The recurrence of a theme, a journey, a sighting, an ending. In every dream it is the same. I wander down circuitous paths in all places I have ever lived. I always reach the same barren hills, grassy under sun. I seem to walk toward Dawn. I always reach the Last Hill, forested on its top. I run in panting excitment into the hilltop woods. I run into the shade of shadow boughs. There I face a blazing forest eaves, the end of trees. A fire lines the foot of the forest's border to a world beyond the woods, a blazen meadow beyond the trees. In unutterable desire, I run to the wood's edge, and WAKE in my bed.

The 2006 dream began with me and my father on a wandering search through Madison for a place I vowed to show him. "It's a place you've never seen before, and I know the way!" I knew the way for I'd walked it a hundred times, and I'd never been there in waking life. I took my own father to the woods beyond the world, and the fire-edge beyond the woods. I pictured the way as I walked, and WHILE I walked, I replayed every dream I'd ever had about the way there. How else would I remember the way? When dreaming, all past dreams, all waking life even, formed the backdrop of my memory. The memory of dreams was no figment of this one dream - it was of dreams I'd ACTUALLY DREAMED in years past. Magic is full of sense. Dad and I began our walk at International Co-op, grown over and woven by a gnarled tree embracing the braces of the House itself. Should the Tree die, the House would die. The home had rotted - only root and bough held it from falling. Stonecrash, crumblewall, dogflesh. Dreams intertwined with dreams, murmured the purest sooth.

In 2005, I dream my way out of the crumbling edifice. I dream that all one dozen of our co-op houses are joined in one, and I look along linked paths to Ambrosia Co-op. Its cellars are rooved by the roots of great trees. I meet and greet the revellers and denizens, some at play and some at rest. The root roof becomes the skyroof of treetops, and I'm deep in a forest. The forest files away in long columns into the distance, an unbroken corridor of bole and leaf. I reach a highway linking England to Co-op Land. Morris dancers dance at the crossroads. Fiddlers saw on the greens. I cross the road. There! Above me rises a grassy slope, with a haunting hair of forest hiding the crest. I lope up in lungeing longing. Once in the trees, I see the ember-eaves at heaven's edge. A gilding glow of our sunset signals the dawn of the otherworld, as I pace my path toward the trace of dawn, the meadow of melted gold.

Claustrogyny

Spring 2003, I dreamt. I was a guest at the house of an old woman. My closest friends were there. She lodged us in a high-vaulted loft without windows. In the dark, the rafters could barely be seen; the floor planks ran under cover of dark. It smelt of hay and musty dust. Dry as a bone, but wet on the ends. Wide wooden columns reached up to the vault, lost in shadow. Surroundng each pillar, and piled in each corner, lay half descriable urns and bins, wooden chests, and stacks of hair, matted and manged. She bedded us down on the floor, thick under many blankets. The old woman snuffed out the lights, quick like a spider. She spun her threads. Wire-wool blankets she spread on the walls. The air hung stuck on the pricks of stubble. Her silkworm body slipped away in a crack; her white withers sank away in the black. Gone, O Yes. Instead of sleep, I began to snoop, what fun. I ransacked the boxes and bins, cramming fat sacks with handfuls of grime. With my hands I sliced the viscous air, squeezing the flesh of dust. I stuffed the sacks as fast as I could, bulgeing with bird-bones and clodded dung. With a twist of anger, she reeled around. Her hands fell like flails, gripping the sacks, dumping the dust and thrashing the chaff. She vanished with a whish and vampish whisk. Then sudden return. Four steps she took, four deadfalling notes descending. Dank dour power. With one fast push, she packed a pillow flush in the door. I crouched and creeped, slunk over friends asleep in the dark. I heard long pauses between their heaves, their slow lungs lifting their coma chests. I fingered and felt the flow of the walls, their nooks and nicks, the ungrovelled grooves. I groped onto hinges, long-line creases, the unseen frame of a door. In a fit of defiance, I pushed on the wood. The wall swung open, the swinging doors of a mammoth mow. I yanked at the bins, the boxes and bones. I hurled in haste, heaving in handfuls. Lifted tables and dressers, desks and chairs - crashed them on tarmac below. They smacked and splintered far down hard. The wind blew eddies in the sunlit grit. With troll steps of wroth, she strode straight back. My friends rubbed their eyes in the blinding light. Get out! I bellowed, like a billow of wind. Whirring, a helicopter hovered at the doors. Ropeladders fell for my wobbly friends. I stayed back, stalking. In all her height she stood still, hard by a pillar. I walked behind her, wrapped her, folded her flanks, softly touched her silken belly, blew into her ear. Her head sank back, her ice-eyes shut. Her anger went out in a pang of pain, her silkwarm skin turned to snow and stone.

Westbliss Œstrus

The Gael awakes in classroom dusk.
Sun sets on the dun West.
Coupling smiles engraven the hour,
smelted by westering fire.
Ember-face etches her trace of Time,
Aster-face paces her desire.
Sunfall, sylph-rise, soulbliss;
*Solas on Ithiriel, ethereal solace.
Swiftwing, lustfell, quickbeat;
Flutterkiss, floodrush, foundness.
Flankswell, fullness, Œstrus.
Gatherwarm, sundercool, cinderbreath;
Kindlefriend, candlemate, comradess,
Amicus.

*Irish, ‘light’

-Nph, 27 February 2006 /9 February 2008; sourced in September 2005 at Indian Lake east of Mazomanie.