red books

Another brief but vivid dream came to me last night:

I found myself in a store that sold both used/damaged housewares (pillows, sheets, etc.) and used books. I sat in front of this huge bookshelf inhabited by both red-stained pillows and equally stained (and worn to the fringes) books. I filled an old backpack--one I used to use in college--with books and pillows. Everything I touched grew a grimy red. It wasn't blood, but more like paint that hasn't' quite dried. When the bag was full, I sat and looked at my booty.

I don't need these, I thought, pulling out some pillows.

Or these. I removed several books.

Just before I woke up, my bag was completely empty.

I realized just a few minutes ago that maybe the red of the books and pillows were pulled out of something I used to see whenever I took the M1 home at night. There used to be a building near 57th Street that was brightly lit at all times. The windows revealed bookcase after bookcase of red books. Every time I passed this building I looked for these books, wondering what the red books were for. Then one night, the bookshelves were empty. Not a single book was left.

I wonder and wonder about these books. Where they journeyed to. What their goal was in the end.

spin, earth, spin

There are ads that paper the subway car walls. These ads sell everything from cosmetic surgery to beer (there's one beer ad that says "It's always worth it in New York"--which I don't get, really). The ones that make my day are ads for Poetry in Motion, a book that has poems with imagery of movement. Each ad has a little gem of a poem for the strap hangers to read. I saw one today that made me smile. I can't remember the poet or the entire line that grabbed me by the heart. I just remember the poem said something about, and I'm seriously paraphrasing: "all those single syllable words that spin between the earth and silence." It was something like that.

It is a nice thought. A nice image for my chilly ride home on a rattletrap subway. The thought of every word ever spoken since the beginning of time spinning between the earth and Whatever It Is Out There is quite peaceful.

My life has been a little crazy lately. I won't bore you with details. But today, for the first time in quite some time I feel a sense of--I don't know what word to use--a sense of comfortable silence. I'm sitting in our cluttered, yellow-walled Harlem studio that has an impending doom of our preferred rent being a thing of the past and we're holding the ravaging roaches barely at bay and our radiator is broken and our pipes leak lead and water. But I feel okay with it all.

I'm taking an eight-week writing workshop next month, and the hint of a novel (that has been in the back of my mind for quite awhile and has finally pulled itself out of that space) has been flirting with me. I don't know what it will be exactly, but it will be about a house. I'm seeing a house roll over the prairie.

Q dreams

I just woke up from a dream that is one of the weirder ones I've had in awhile.

I dreamed I was riding the 2 or 3 train and had to connect with the Q train. At some unknown station I saw the Q on the other track, so I got off, only to see the Q's doors close and feel the wind as it left. Now, this Q that had just departed was only a two car train. And I had never seen this station before. It was in this cave with little light and the floors were covered in kitchenware. My feet sank in wherever I walked. One other scary-looking person with a shovel got off with me. He growled, and dashed off into one of the tunnels. I was alone and scared and I kept sinking and sinking. Other vehicles flashed by: cars, trucks, other trains that weren't the Q. None of them stopped. When you wait for a train in real life you can always feel the rush of wind and the hazy light before you see or hear it. I kept feeling the wind and seeing the light, but the Q didn't follow. Other people came and waited with me. That made me feel better. The man with the shovel came back, but since there were others, I wasn't scared.

Then I woke up.

I don't always put much stock in dreams, but this one has meant something to me. I do feel like I'm standing on a platform that's swallowing me. I do feel like I'm waiting for things that never arrive. I feel both lonely and surrounded by love.

crossing the park

Tom, David and I walked the full-length of Central Park last week. It was a nice way to look at New York, or the New York that hides New York, if that makes any sense. The park starts (or ends, depending on your perspective) at 110th Street and goes until 57th. We started at 110th and wended our way down, passing Onassis Reservoir, the conservatory--and my favorite, the statue of the Angel of the Waters at Bethesda Terrace.

The sculptor, Emma Stebbins (the first woman to receive a sculptural commission in New York City), had this quote from the Bible:

Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called… Bethesda…whoever then first after the troubling of the waters stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.

It's nice to have an angel in a park watching over us. The thought that we can be healed by a tremor in the water.