Three Dreams

1.

I was dreaming of Dayton, Ohio, my grade school, etc. Behind the school
the playground extended only up to the road that went to the Sherwood
Twin’s drive-in’s
north screen and we were playing there—on the grass—
at night, full moon on us. Our clothes were on but all of us in short sleeves
and short pants, summer clothes. On the road your race changed, you’d be
black or white depending on what you were on the grass playground, if you
trod on the road. “If you go on the road,” we said, laughing. Play going on,
the game coming to the punchline again and again, to get or have the other
race on the gravel road to the screen. Laughing behind our hands, covering
our faces, this behind Jane Addams School in Dayton. The change felt like
magic, we said, it went right through you.

* * *

2.

That I was architect of a regional plan, a transportation authority, a system
of large and small buses and light rail vehicles. But that at the celebration in
my honor I was deaf, alone, or maybe dead or nearly dead on the far side
of a hill where it—the hill—sloped down to some water, to a wide river or
lake. There and in the ballroom at once. (My idea had been that the erotic
might best and most effectively be glimpsed in passing, named by the fact
of transit; transit does that in part—where the placard says the bus will go,
you go. You can predict, but only in part, how the trip will go—a train or
bus arriving at pre-arranged
points, the schematic diagram itself, and then
the “complication” of an open return.

* * *

3.

Invited (in the dream) to a party, the theme of which was “Sex and Sexual
After-images,”
to take place at a house on Route 11, south of Syracuse,
N.Y. (In town U.S. 11’s Salina Street but it starts at New York’s border with
Quebec and I’ve driven on it as well in sub-industrial
Birmingham—
surprised to come across it there but why not?—in the new south).
But in the dream it was ahead, that we were going to step out onto the
porch, tease one another with our mouths and then lean against the wood
railing in full view of neighbors and whatever traffic. Inside we were eating,
our clothes off already or half-off.
En-masse
at a long table, arms poised,
eating food off red plates and more was coming. Look ahead had been the
slogan. Upstate, downstate. We were “mixed,” we were in no hurry.