We're back to pretty clouds and sun and wind making the tops of the trees move. This I see from my window. I haven't been out yet. I would like to stay in bed with my bug and drink tea, but I would also like to get moving on such a day. A man across the street fills a blue wheelbarrow with dirt. Three others shovel gravel from a green truck. They rest on shovel handles, talking over their gloves. One wears a yellow t-shirt; one rolls up his sleeves. They are squinting in the sun.
***
In the dream the man gave me two sealed glass jars. In each, an infant snake, a cobra and a king suspended in water, both drowning. It was up to me to let them out but the cobra scared me and I couldn't save one without saving the other. So I walked away and had a conversation with someone about what to feed snakes and let my indecision get the best of me until my companion realized in the course of our conversation that my snakes were dying and acted quickly to open the jars though it was too late. They were dead.
***
The bodies were soft and limp but for tiny bones spining through the flesh. They were hairless.
***
"Sooner murder"--
no, that's not where I was going. As a worm on a hook I almost said. As the bare pink skin of a dog's nippled belly and all the little pups inside poking through. (Love kept me apart.) Suspension, and only a little time is left before.
***
I was saying to the students, notice the inappropriate woman must die. Nearly always. Those things can't (be suffered to) live. As in the case of Eve for example who makes an email announcement to her peers about missing books, missing/stolen books, and receives a backlash tide of responses, not about books, but about how she ought to act, write, address, behave. That will fix her. --And you see what I mean by fix. That's why lynching, why stoning, why impaling: to fix in one place, to pin and wriggling, to suspend to put an end to all suspense.
***
"You may be right but I don't have the heart for it." Is that what you're supposed to say? "Do what you will." How about that? I still don't have an answer to what I ought've done, I'd do the same again, wait, let someone else act, find a distraction, be seduced, hover between venom and (Will kept you apart) helplessness in my own inertia knowing no inaction is inert. There is hardly a before. There is only towards and with it terror.
***
Not towards, but through. Through and with it terror. "I don't know, I've never understood it."
***
***795: These yelling Monsters that with ceasless cry
796: Surround me, as thou sawst, hourly conceiv'd
797: And hourly born, with sorrow infinite
798: To me, for when they list into the womb
799: That bred them they return, and howle and gnaw
800: My Bowels, their repast; then bursting forth
801: Afresh with conscious terrours vex me round,
802: That rest or intermission none I find. (Paradise Lost II)
You know what it is? That I want to say "I didn't put them there." That I walked away and thought "I will think about this later, these snakes smiling in water, I will suspend judgment" because I was in love--with whom? wrong question--. The appropriate point to make is I had no business being in love. No business. Busyness is dizzying.
***
Appropriate. Point. Do.
***
As the catheter stuffed urethra. As the plush nippled belly full of tiny bones pushing through. The shovel shoved up the middle of the effigy, the midway I came to myself in a dark wood. A jar in each hand. As she put it in her mouth, bit, and swallowed. As am I holding you up: am I
***
in the cool of the evening taking a walk in the trees. If you want to know she waffled. She sat beneath its shade, and watched the light move in its leaves. She kicked at the windfalls, plucked a few samples. She talked to her companion and felt loving and too small. And why not become a vessel? And why not be baited. She knew. She waited. I put them through it. For my brooding.
***
