. . .

I thought the old dream might come back to me again last night as it did in the most sleepless years when I had little to do but worry: the uncomplicated repetitive nightmare of him looking on as the dreamer, omniscient, arms crossed, vexed, as if by existing at all in my own dream I had intruded on the real dream, his. The Fathered dream. And that was the question of the dream: what are you doing here? Not just the unanswerable question posed to oneself--well, what is anybody doing here?--but the unanswerable question posed to one's Other which is not a question after all: what are you doing here. It repeats itself because or so long as there is no imaginable response from either the dreamer or the dreamed, which, it turns out, are the same.

***

The dream conceived this notebook.

("And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be? ... You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream! If that there King was to wake you'd go out--bang!--just like a candle!")

***

But no, last night I dreamed of a small quarry of black ore that gave off a luminous green-blue light when the moon rose. And it was summer. And I was home, in the old landscapes of the mine, Stargo. And it had something to do with copper and something to do with the warmth of the night where we sat in the tall grass around the quarry with luminous rocks in our shirts and laps, digging. That's all we were doing. Digging.

***

So many places I'd show you.

***