Late-night opus for dream seraphs....

My body folded it's limbs into a vivid pocket of sleep last night accompanied by the dream symphony of gypsy angels. Dulcet harmonies hung heavily around my forehead like dole-cratered satellites. My body, still drained from interstate vertigo, floated up and into itself in search of a horse named salvation. In search of a hushed vision anchored in subconcious soil, milked by the quiet stream resonance of light entering stain glass. Was this my reward for leaving and refusing to come back? These staccato hard scratches of light that peel my body in half. The illuminating tiff of interior transcendence? Was this my reward simply for leaving?

*

In the dream Vanessa is standing crossed limb and taller than me as if on stilts and we are having the one conversation that escaped us. Her hair is long and her lips bite into one no-none-shit burgundy hyphen and both of our bodies are facing the polar other.

"What else do you need to know?" She requests. I know all about Jeff. She knows all about Carol. I remember holding her on my tear-swell carpet in my old apartment on Columbia Terrace, listening to the Beatles, watching as the last thirteen months of joy mingled with hurt grazed frustration emptied her body through her sockets. The last time we made love it was almost a human impossibility. Hard lanks of limbs using the other for levitation, and seeminly, succumbing to crumble.

"What happened to us?" Vanessa cries in real-life, five years ago.

"What else do you need to know?" Vanessa asks me last night, in the goassamer foam of dream.

I realize now that I don't know the answer to either query.


*

"It was as if the whole world were a dream, being dreamed by a single dreamer, where all the dream charchters dream too. In India this is known as the Net of Indra." A magnetic digitalized cassette of Jospeh Campbell says in his James Joyce lectures titled Wings of Art, amplified through the lobes of my stereo.

"You go through life. You get this job, you marry this person, you have this experience amd its almost like everything that happens to you has been unplanned. Then you get to about sixty or so and you look back over at the discourse of your life, and, by god, its got the continuity of the novel.

"Schopenhauer asks the question,'Who wrote the book?'"

*
Her voice empties out late at night into the husk of the phone and pours majestically into my ears. The ends of her sentences roll and kick and drool puddles of excitement into my body. I smile. I am exhausted. I tell her that I want to hold her right now. Even though I can't, I tell her I can.

"I went fishin' in my chest last night and got a nibble from an angel."

*

In the dream stream Vanessa and I exchange glances and I am choked up for words. She is looking at me with her uppity glare of importance. Her face is perfectly chiseled with pools of fine-featured hues. She retains her mastery of expresssion; a pensive purloined Waterhouse aura usurped from mythological renderings. She is asking me the question again and I am pulling out of her. My entire body is leaving. My neck periscopes; my body scrunches and Vaneesa inquires again.

"Is there anything else you need to know."


*

"Then you realize that everyone who has influenced you has in someway been influenced by you. So your whole life fuses forth from this intersection" Joseph Campbell comments. I press pause and yank the tape from the mouth of the stereo. I continue to dream.

*

All my life father believed in angels....


*

When she leaves she gives you back the ring that you once gave her. The ring your grandmother gave you for confirmation when you were fourteen. The ring that had your initials, D.V.B., chiseled in cursive font inside. The ring she wore around her neck affixing the oval broach to a pink ribbon.

She has a couple of your shirts still. She asks you for her grandfather's suit--the suit you wore to La Boheme.

You wrap her in the quilt your mother gave you. You kiss without entering her face. You are moving out of everything you have lived inside of--or rather she is moving out of you.

*

"David, is there anything else you need to know?"

*

We laugh about our bloggin'-threesome. We talk about mysticism. I publically confess that if I hear the word 'Mara' used one more time in casual conversation I'm gonna adopt a mutt and address it by that name.

"See," She says. "That's your 'Mara'. You're afraid of embracing it or even acknowledging it."

"But if I had a dog named Mara I could tell it to go fetch. I could tell it to go roll over. I could tell it to go beg. I could tell it to go shit on the groutchy neighbors thoroughly-groomed rhododendrons."

"Your still ignoring your Mara." She says in a tone that's implicit of 'I'm-the-smartest-girl-in-a-classroom-full-of-dumb-boys' vibes.

"I'm not ignoring it." I say. "I'm just giving my Mara a milk-bone."

"Even if it is your dog." The intelligent girl smiles. "You still have to pet it from time to time. It still comes to you to be fed."

True. I think.

"Touchay!" My palate surrenders.

*

In the dream stream she invocates the question again. She asks me what else I need to know. Everything we ever felt for each other is lying face down in a pool of our own failure and infidelity in front of us. She asks me again. I watch as her body becomes the question mark. I watch as her body becomes the mystery. I watch as her body opens and closes the way a garage door opens and closes--the way a question opens and closes.

"What else do you need to know?" She reiterates. That moment, in my dream, my head conducts a blurry spin like an elementary classroom globe and I see him. I finally see him. I see my dad.

*

"I prayed for my bloggin'-buddies." I tell her. "I prayed for Uncle Mike and Marjein. I said the fire tablet and thought of you. I prayed for the community of scattered souls. I prayed for insight and assistance for those who need it. I recited the long-healing prayer that I love. I looked up at the doiley-threaded dome and said the greatest name.

"I prayed for peace."

*

"What bothers you so-much about Mara?" She asks.

" I don't know." I answer honestly. "There's a certain realm of dedication where your hobby overtakes you and you become one with that in which you were initially seeking. Get what I'm saying."

Her lips hallucinate verbal tapestry. I continue on with my bull-shit rant.

"With mysticim, especially, we talk about it like we're in a book club sometimes and don't realize that potentially, it could destroy us. We spin around in that dervish-vortex so many times that eventually we no longer have to rely on the slow gravitational tug of the earth and the sun to orchestrate the continuity of the seasons because, from our periphery, its already here. All time and space, eternity in itself has been eclipsed in this moment that last forever."

"That's true with any profession. Any devotion, not just mysticism. You always run the risk of throwing yourself out there and not coming back. The boat seldom makes it back to port without embracing a tempset or two. "

"True." I think and smile.

*

My dream-stream vision has averted from the slender frame of Vanessa and I am chasing my father. I see the back of his gray hair in front of me. We are in a labyrinth of cubicles and I am chasing him. I am shouting out his name and he is almost ignoring me.

He is moving faster. His back is zipping around hard-cornered plastic. The cubicles of the white-collar bussiness office is starting to look like the hard-curves of the human brian. I am trying to reach him. Trying to hold him again. I see his neck and his shoulders hovering in front of me, speeding, vascillating, vanishing, appearing. Vanessa has completely dissipated and I still haven't seen the front of my father's face yet. We are silver-beams streaking around the contours of the universe.
I am trying to hold him again. I call out his name and he pretends he doens't know me.

*

In reality-stream I received a card from Glinda, Vanessa's mother when my father died. I called Vanessa up to thank her for the card and she hung up on me.

The next day when I spotted her runway-gait strutting across campus I accost her. She turns the other way and keeps on walking.

*

"When you see Buddha in the middle of the street....."

*

"Dad!"

*

"When you see Mara massaging your emotional mettle..."

*

"Christ was crucified because he said 'I and the father are one.'" Says Joseph Campell after I placed the rectagular magnet back inisde the appliance mouth.

*

I have been chasing the back of my father. Chasing his torso and his thighs. I can smell him. Smell his hair. Smell his body begining to leak drops of perspiration. I see his occiput and his earlobes. I see the back of his glasses. I am chasing him and I am unable to connect.

*

".....Only connect." Epigram from E.M. Forrester's Howard's End.

*

"...the further one travels, the less one knows."
-Buddhist adage.

*
"And in that second of silence, I heard my mother's voice. And I heard her say something that I had heard many times before: "In times of great danger, say aloud "Ya Baha'u'l-Abha!" So I said it."

-Arya Badiyan

*
After I say the greatest name to my father's back he turns around and pauses and I can see his face. He is somewhere else, but right now he is with his son. I am drowned in the nautical fathoms of dream-stream but I can smell his hard skin, can smell his breath and his hair. I can feel his embrace. And I am moved to tears, moved to tears as I blog when I think about that the fact that the one word I said to get him to stop was the one word he said to me, when he did stop and turned around and addressed his only son by saying the greatest name.

*

Was this my reward? Was this my inter-dimesnional tithe? Was he thanking me for saying prayers for him at the HOuse of Worship. Was he thanking his son?

*

" I should warn you," I tell her voice into the phone. "I really don't do well with girls whose first name ends with the letter 'a'.

She pauses

"Damn vowels." I say to myself afterwards, covered in an applause of laughter.

*

(smiles)