I have constructed an image of you in my mind: luminous, enhaloed by a sky-blue shell, with a robe of white velvet and a necklace of black jade. I have set it in the garden of my heart, beneath the flowing fountain of my desire, where the honeysuckle drips with longing like pearls of dew, and at the feet of this idol I have laid my life:

The black leather and white porcelain of the unknown road; the clicking, flashing light of the watchman still searching (but for what?); the tangled dream of my home, now withered like a tiny, decorative spruce tree with its brown, dead needles still shining on the branches; the painted mask of a clown who cannot speak; the delicate fingers of a craftsman now trembling too violently to work; the obscure, resilient faces of the women I have loved, fading and appearing as if through mist, each one carrying one of my tears in her mouth, as a silent, inarticulate message for you; a flute, hollow and breathless; painted words that will not speak, written in a strange, incomprehensible alphabet that neither one of us could have imagined; yes, I have even laid the putrid reality of my privilege, there where it threatens to overwhelm everything else and make even you disappear like one more drop of red blood spilled for green money...

O my love, my dear one, my cherished, painful longing -- do not turn away from me because of this. If you could only come to me whole in the immensity of your unleashed laughter, if I could only touch you right now, simply, palm to palm, this image would shatter into a thousand pieces and scatter like stars across the dome of the undiscovered sky.

It's not the dream that sings, but the body.
For the blood and sinews and bones that we wear
Are not the same as the soul that hovers, precious and shining,
Within its ineffable cage.
But no less necessary, no less complete, no less impossible,
No less simple, no less sacred, no less fragile
Is this bag of skin
That gives a place for the light pulsing in our veins,
That lets us touch the breath passing and returning,
Or sing with the skin or sigh with the fingers.
The gift is not this pool with candles floating among the multi-colored roses,
Not the violins drifting above the sound of water flowing from a bronze fish's mouth,
Not the way the light shines golden thru the whiskey,
But rather when you put your ear against the pulse of my neck,
Or my fingers slide underneath your hair to slip down the ridge of your spine,
pressing into the soft flesh of your hips,
Or our tongues laugh together wetly...
This almost always seems like already too much to me,
As if my cup were not already drunk, and drunk again,
With the wide weight of what we offer each other.
But when we tie our bodies to the love that burns us,
And the water of our selves spills as one
Voice unbidden and wrapped in a moment of joy,
There is no other gift that will resurrect these ashes,
Even as it falls in pieces, exhausted by the tears that can't know why they come.

I just got a ticket for a hundred dollars for not changing the light bulb that burned out on my car two months ago. But it wasn't really for that. It was because my registration had expired and I didn't know it. Which might have been OK, but this was the second time I got stopped for the same headlight and the first time I got a ticket for driving with a suspended license, which I should've known about, except that I got it last January for not paying a speeding ticket which I forgot about the year before. But the cop didn't say anything about the registration.... And this is not to mention the bills that are buried under the junk mail on my desk or the glow-in-the-dark paint that's sticking all over the bathroom sink or the box of dead crickets by the terrarium or the video I should've already returned to Blockbuster or any number of other fucked up things I could think of if I weren't sitting here trying to justify why I can't do anything about it all.

But what's worse is that my dreams are like this, too. It's as if I had stuffed them all into that overcrowded storage closet in ragged boxes, buried under old suitcases, with one shelf collapsed under the weight and the whole thing leaning against the opposite wall waiting for the next earthquake to come crashing down. I keep waiting, keep hoping, for the calm that never comes, for the moment to sort them out and really look clearly at the failed expectations of my life. I am not a young man anymore, so why do I keep hanging on to these dreams that I have stuffed into the back corner of my hope? The wild wishes of my tweens will never be useful to me again, so why keep them like moldy pages on the bottom of a broken cardboard box?

I'd much rather my dreams were like stones, flat and smooth and carefully laid in a path reaching toward the door. Then my passing could be like wet feet on a summer morning: dark footprints in water on stone, fading away in light, less than a mist in air.

In my house, there is a marble mantle with a beveled mirror above it, and in that mirror I watched you turning on the dance floor, turning and turning, spinning out the door and onto the balcony, lifting up like a winged seed in the opposite of falling, and then I followed you up the stairs (grey-green stone steps, smooth, mahogany handrails) and along the thickly decorated carpet to open a paneled door painted yellow. My hand still on the glass doorknob, I saw you again: dark golden skin shining thru a diaphanous, white dress. I saw your singing reach out to me and spin me, lift me up trembling like a butterfly, and I followed the air out the window and up along the edges of the ivy-covered stone, only the tips of my fingers carrying me up along the wall, and then I slid over the sill, under the edge of the cracked window and into the red room. I closed my eyes and still saw red, opened my eyes and felt the red walls pulsing body, heart, center... You were not here, only a pounding repeating this place, where I knew myself as a cell, holding captive the water of something else too impossible to name, and then I knew I could make a choice, make any choice I wanted, so I opened my mouth and found the garden under the stairs in the center of the house (dogwood trees in blossom, fish and turtles swimming in a gurgling pool where rose petals and candles were floating), and some hands offered me a flute -- a simple silver flute with seven holes and no keys -- but they were not your hands, so I went back into the house, thru the glass doors, running my fingers along the brown moulding of the long hallway, not in a hurry, not anxious, but anticipating where you might be, and the ballroom again was spinning, and the deer were dancing with us on their hind legs, drops of mist filtering the music, and I asked you to remember, only remember where and when we passed.

I've had this dream before -- each time it transmutes, transubstantiates, translates itself into another tongue, and my mouth is left gaping with the feeling, not the meaning of the words.

The horse of love is red, roan, an earth color sweeping across the desert grass, a wind of dust pulsing like blood. There is no why for this running; there is no choice when the body is already flying over the ground. It doesn't matter whether it's a river of sadness or a little dribble of joy deliberately spilt from an over-full cup, it must flow as it will -- as it will, red and bloody.

The dream of love is something I have had many times over, all the souls of my family walking like mist over flowers of grain, each seed a love come to me for sustenance like a finger pressing into my flesh, asking for something, asking for anything. There is no need to ask why, though my son loves to, over and over, laughing and laughing. This dream is red, like anger, like bleeding, because it comes like necessity and feels like hope. The tiny hands of a newborn baby -- crumpling and squawling, opening and closing -- are dropping cascades of snow over the sepia photograph of my great grandmother. She smiles and fades, smiles and fades.

The dream horse of love will come, galloping, when there is no difference between what I know and what I want. Then it will pause for a moment, gulping the air at the end of the canyon, turn again, and ramble on like a seed or a weed spinning in the wind.

I can't hold on to this horse with words; she's almost always already gone. So how could I ever ride bareback, with my face in her mane, and my legs pumping with hers? I want to celebrate this impression, setting down heartbeats of desire, breathing for another miracle.