It’s true none of this has to do with dreams. I’ve really been there – all of there. I would know the locations on a map – even if, even when – I do go back and no longer can find it’s crystal caves, its sweeping valleys, its secret old towns hidden behind the new towns where the woods people still live inside of wooden shingled houses with iron cookstoves. I know where to find ancient treasures in the vast canyons – I’ve climbed up and down those rock walls, traversed the entire landscape from a keyhole in a ridge overlooking the city from the top of a quiet suburban street, been there through the scruffy shrubs of vacant lots, through hidden tunnels.
I know as if every backroad I’ve explored in this life is backroad to another larger miraculous enchanted life – but it wasn’t life that was any different. I was the same adventurous one – seeking only what the land could tell me – sleeping with my ear to her soft earth. Her dust traveling into my head with all of the tiny pieces of ancient memory. I know every one of those particles as if they are the vast wildernesses where they came from. I’ve been inside of the pinecone. Her sappy scent has flavored my meals. I taste her sticking to my teeth my teeth as if my teeth are but fossils, small stones.
And I’ll sleep with a stone beneath my pillow, until the pillow turns over into a sail and lightens into a frail flag a feather. I am not lost at the sea of dream. I know where I am. I know each place on the map of memory that wakes to the next place and the next place. I’ve been all of there. It doesn’t look the same. I am not lost – yet I cannot find my way back.
There is a giant emerald lake beyond a little mining town in the high Rockies. When you go way way out on the water to it’s farthest edge it overlooks the San Francisco Bay. I know. I’ve been there.
