Dreams. There was a baby. Often there's a baby. In dreams. There were fields. A hospital. There were fish, I think, and tall trees. And a lover.

Dreams I lose as I age simply because I forget to drink water. If anything can make me drink water it will be the desire to remember my dreams.

Days have been gray and rainy, with here and there a sunbeam.

(Yesterday there was sun, with plaid skies at dawn, a return of the criss-crossing of chemtrails I haven't seen in a couple of years. I'd thought maybe Obama made them stop. Someone down in the valley noticed them too and posted a photo of his checkered sky on Facebook, and we had a brief chat about it. He too had thought that activity was over.)

Today, gray, with a line of brilliant light in the east between the edge of this cloudplatter and the black tops of the WarnerRange.

And what were my dreams? ... A nurse. A waiting room. A baby who was born and getting colostrum from my breasts, nursing hungrily, while the doctor left the room to look for medicine.

We finally brought Figgy in on Thursday afternoon. She is covered in tiny green figs! I couldn't believe it. Lemony is still too small to set fruit. He grows squat under Figgy in the same pot, spread out from side to side like a juniper tam.

Argued with husbandSkip a good portion of yesterday, a more or less good-natured debate, with me not really debating because I still don't have all the facts--whether tropical astrology (Western, even-geometrical-house-based, the one just about everyone uses) or sidereal astrology (Eastern, ancient, ragged-uneven-constellation-based) is the Real Thing. Skip bewildered that I can't see the folly and illogic of thinking sidereal. I curious to know about all the other possibilities and explore them as far as they take me. I think sidereal astrology makes perfect sense. And I think Skip is sorry he ever taught me the basics in the first place. Because I hadn't studied them very well or very long before I found the Fixed Stars and stopped looking very hard at Planets.

In the dream there was a corner, we were turning corners ... There was a lover watching from the field. Our vehicle was huge and heavy. We could hardly back it up to inch it around the sharpest corner ... Oh, well this one is obvious: I was leafing through a book of dream interpretations in a thrift store the other day and noticed an entry for "Corner"--"if you dream of turning a corner ..." and I thought it was funny to pick apart one's dreams so minutely. And so the Dream Maker incorporated that element. Apparently.

Since sunrise through my open bedroom window I have heard distant echoing concussions, as though giant sledgehammers hit giant nails somewhere. I still hear them, and now I remember how it is on weekends in hunting season, here on the outskirts of town.

Run fast, Bucky, wherever you are!



[Addendum, sidereal vs. tropical astrology explained vis Rob Hand in his Horoscope Symbols:

“There are two ways of measuring the progress of a planet through the zodiac. One is to use the so-called sidereal zodiac, which is a measure of a planet’s relation to the background of the fixed stars. The other is to use the so-called tropical zodiac, which is a measure of a planet’s relation to the point in the sky where the Sun is on the first day of Spring. This point, known as the vernal equinox, or 0° Aries of the tropical zodiac, moves clockwise or backwards in the zodiac in relation to the fixed stars at the rate of about 1° every 72 years. About 2,000 years ago, the signs of the tropical zodiac lay in about the same part of the heavens as the constellations of the same name, but now 0° of tropical Aries has moved 24° to 25° back into the constellation of Pisces. This movement of the vernal point is called the precession of the equinoxes.”

Get it? The tropical zodiac’s “starting line” is now 25 degrees before the sidereal zodiac’s— almost an entire sign behind.]

The buck stops here

Raw green tomatoes. Strange appetites. This is my well-antlered backyard buddy. Waiting out the rain with a flock of quail. Thick neck, says passerby, he's already in rut. Makes 'em dangerous? I ask. No, just stupid, he says. They go out and get themselves shot.

Three bees work the purple catmint blossoms, furious, flopping their fat bodies around in the tender blooms like ravenous manatees. Yellowjackets zigzaghover or dance on the surface tension of water in the cats' front-step bowl.

From the baked earth of the vacant lots next door the heat rolls over in waves. BrotherB plays there, flings a Frisbee and runs to retrieve it, giggles and shows me his Popeye bicep, pointing, saying "I strong!" And he is stronger somehow, gaining weight and color. Wispy tips of brown hair (and the occasional white one) are showing in small patches of scalp all over his head, a remission of some kind. Maybe he'll get it all back for a while. That would be cool.

Weird night. Woke at 3, stayed awake. So, OK. Mapped stars of secondary magnitude on the chart wheel (having completed the first-magnitude stars yesterday). Done with that now. I have moneywork to find.

This may be the year's last really hot day. By Sunday night the weatherguys predict overnight lows in the 20s F. So Figgy and Lemony will have to come indoors this weekend, and the aloe and jade plants. I'll pull the green tomatoes on their vines and bring them in to ripen in the laundry space. One last lawnmow. Although I suppose the weather could warm up for another pass at the grass before snow season.

It's quiet out there. Too quiet.

Headphones. Trying to find the least intrusive sounds that also have a thick enough pile to divert downstairs noise of horseracing from belovedhusband's unwalled office. My fault for sleeping in today and so overlapping worktime. Interesting rhythm, the patter of horserace announcers. Similar to that of auctioneers, but there's no nonsense words or filler: it's megasense, all fine-tuned perception channeled directly into the microphone for the minute or two that the horses have the track.

Brian Eno doesn't do it. Seems like Liquid Mind works best, has the densest blanket of sound, but who wants a runny brain?

Goal for today: not to come apart from the heat, as I did yesterday. This year's summer overall was comfortable and cool, but now we have that dreaded second run it takes at us sometimes around October. Maybe the tomatoes (the ones the deer left us, the ones not turned to mush by early frosts) will ripen after all.

I'm reading a Stephen Dobyns poem in this month's American Poetry Review. The poem is a long one, superficially prosey but with real music in it if you listen closely. I hope the doctrine of Fair Use permits me to extract some lines here:

          ... I doubt Basho
when writing a poem ever said: This will knock
their socks off. ...

and

Basho said that ever since his windswept spirit
began to write poetry it never felt at peace with itself
but was prey to all sorts of doubts. Once it wanted
the security of a job at court and once it wanted
to measure the depths of its ignorance by becoming
a scholar. ...

and

          ... And he said
he didn't become a courtier or a scholar because
his unquenchable love of poetry held him back.
In fact, his windswept spirit knew no other art
than the art of writing poetry, and consequently,
it clung to it, he said, more or less blindly. At times
I repeat those last words to myself: more or less
blindly.

Of course, extracting like this does great violence to the piece, which is about ducks, and lighthouses, and water, and Basho.

          ... And I'm glad that Basho
didn't say the product or purpose was the poem's
future life, but instead the product was the writing,
that Basho was writing the poem for itself alone--
as reckless as that seems--and not for any future
profit. Doesn't this put Basho in the category
of nutcase ...?

I'm positive I've exceeded my quote quota now. Done enough out-of-contextual damage by now. But OK, one more (spoiler alert!):

          ... A little ways from shore, light
reflects off the water as if from the sun's hand mirror
and I like to believe that shortly there will emerge
from the iridescence, more or less blindly, a small
boat carrying an aged Japanese poet, at which point
I'll jump from my truck into the wind's whirling
ambiguity and shout and wave my hat over my head.
Nothing is rational about this and it's something
about which I should maybe keep my mouth shut,
but it's an event the ducks and I hope to see happen,
not for profit, mind you, just for the thing itself.

This poem fills me with great happiness. And now it's noon.

Skip's two lovebirds in their cage downstairs call to one another, piercing abrupt and yet beautiful noises that penetrate the headphones' soundblanket. They call and respond and call and respond, and they're only an inch apart.

Dreams of Last November 17

* The old dog died and was buried.
I keened at the grave.

* I spent a night in Mexico.
When I came home I told John all about it.

* The very young man went around
with a beautiful blonde woman twice his size.
I imagined their sex together,
like a queen bee and a drone.

* I am my grandmother browbeating her teenaged daughter to go to work.
Also I am me, begging my grandmother to let the girl study and get her degree.

* She shot him right through the windshield.
He lay bleeding on the ground.
I hunkered on the car floor pretending to be dead.
We should have told her we were married.