last night i dreamed i had taken LSD and was running away from home. instead of causing the normal feelings LSD causes, it gave me the power to control how gravity affected me. i was bouncing like an astronaut on the moon, down fields of grass and onto a big ferry. i saw this guy i've only met once, in victoria, and he was on LSD too and told me to follow him off the boat, leaping across the water, and led me to a restaurant where my huge number one crush was working as a bartender. huge number one crush and i flirted crazily for a while while crush fed me vodkas. then we had a playful wrestling match in the 'lounge' area of the bar and i got flipped on my back and we started to make love right there in front of everyone and i was so happy, i used my anti-gravity LSD powers to float us right up to the ceiling.

snow day

this morning, the sky faints pink, watery yellow, blue
and this damp cloth is pushing spilled coffee grounds around the counter.
i'm listening to a forecast that i'm totally numb to .
outside, my sparrow heart is trapped in a snowbank, fluttering softly and cold.
she was blindsided by the flurry of white from above
but i have no sympathy because she had warning.
the boughs had been groaning all night.
i'm washing a dish now, i've washed it twice, tinny radio news
has a flat effect on my face, i can't hide this broken rib much longer.
i keep pulling at the hem of my shirt, stretching it out, fatiguing it
the rib pokes out anyway and it aches purple, it aches black.
no amount of careful movement, no amount of gentle prodding
puts this rib back in place, it just burns there halfway between my gut and heart.
hey! you didn't owe me anything! and who would have been surprised,
everyone at that movie asked for a refund because the ending was so cliche,
and the starring roles were taken up by plain people
with predictable lines and worse, the camera work was shaky. amateurs.
the glamour was steam on the lens from the humid air
not the memory of some perfect night
not memory of compulsion nor the dimming of light. just hot air, all hot air.
i can't bend right
to sweep now and i hear the snow plow coming! oh, dammit.
i run outside to rescue my sparrow heart, deep inside i am tender towards her
even though she is stupid and careless and needs to be
taught a hard lesson. just not today.
i'm on my knees in an icy bank,
i'm scooping up handfuls of snow with raw red hands
it feels colder when my skin is hot from dishwater
and at the bottom, on patchy dead grass, there she lies still now,
still as an icicle, feathery chest lifts.
one glowing hand yanks at my shirt hem, it hurts as it pulls on a rib.
the other hand deposits her in the pocket of my spattered apron,
next to the crumpled movie ticket stub.
heat from the oven will revive her, i think.

i have had this dream before. several times before, actually. in it, we remember that we have two more floors to our house, upstairs, behind a built-in bookshelf, sort of 'diary of anne frank' style. we don't know why we keep forgetting about them, because they are fantastic floors...better even than what we normally live in.

in this dream the topic comes up because we are talking with the children about how to re-arrange their sleeping quarters (this is happening in real life - julian wants to comandeer the rec room in the basement and astrid wants to take over his larger bedroom upstairs) and i said, well actually there's a top floor to our house that has a beautiful, beautiful attic bedroom with a big window that lets in lots of light. do you want to see?

of course they do! they are shocked we never brought it up before. i'm shocked that we've been forcing guests to sleep in the basement when all this time we had some beautiful rooms upstairs.

misha pulls open the bookcase and the children are wide-eyed at the staircase in behind. it's wide, and there is natural light pouring down from the upper floors because for some reason they are more windowed than the floors we have been living on. there are two upper levels. we begin to climb the staircase, and i note that the wallpaper and carpeting there are a bit tatty, but not awful. there is the sound of wildlife directly ahead of us and i wonder if we left a 'sounds of nature' tape running the last time we'd remembered to come up here.

the first floor we come out on is a luxuriantly decorated library. it looks straight out of a victorian better homes and gardens. floor to ceiling bookshelves lined with all manner of hardbacks. overstuffed antique chairs here and there. even a small wet bar tucked into a corner with a large mirror behind it, reflecting the scene back at us. everything is wine coloured velvet and mahogany and big lush plants. i hear the sound of a fountain. i look up and there is a glass dome in the ceiling with daylight pouring through. a butterfly floats past astrid's nose. we are all standing and spinning around in wonder at the room we had above our house that was apparently too good for us to live in. i begin to walk around, tracing my fingers here and there, joy and wonder filling my mind, my heart, every muscle. suddenly i recoil my hand as it touches something rough and scaly on one of the little intricately carved side tables. i look more closely and there is some kind of odd lizard there. small and dark blue, almost black. i summon the children and misha over to gaze at him with me. he has a large frill around his head, spiky. his eyes are mere black pinpricks in a sort of squat face. he regards us balefully when suddenly his tongue shoots out and he captures a butterfly with it, a butterfly at least half his size. we shout in surprise and then watch in morbid fascination as he attempts to eat it. its wings struggle against his mouth, against the air, against death. astrid is both horrified and philosophical: "poor butterfly. but lizard has to eat." the butterfly is gone in a few big chomps. and then even more suddenly, our little blue lizard is attacked by a larger lizard that had been camouflaged amongst some of the books on the table next to it. this one is a chameleon, i tell the children. its mouth is huge and wide and it seeks to devour the smaller lizard whole. the smaller lizard puts up a big fight and the children beg us to stop it because it is so brutal. but we don't, we just wait patiently. the bigger lizard has no teeth and his mouth seems too soft to do any real damage to the smaller lizard but in the end, we hear a critching sound indicating a crushed skull and the small lizard stops struggling immediately. i can't watch anymore. i turn. birds are flying around the glass dome above our heads and landing in the potted trees and palms around the room. i realize this is not only a library but some kind of self-contained ecosystem. how had we been living underneath such a marvelous thing for seven years and not visited it every day?

i continue on towards the next flight of stairs, the one that leads to the attic bedroom. this one also has plenty of daylight streaming down, casting dramatic shadows and showing me that the wallpaper here, cornflower blue and cream stripes, is also tatty and neglected. i move from the victorian botantist library upwards into a country house's attic. it is spotlessly clean, with faded blue-painted floors and whitewashed walls. centered under the peak of the roof is a huge round window, from where all the sunlight pours in. on either side of this window are double beds, blonde wood frames and thick mattresses, made up with warm handmade quilts, feather pillows, and crocheted throws. each bed has its own little white night stand that holds a reading lamp and a stack of books. there are small framed pictures hung around the room. a wardrobe at the opposite end. wooden chairs on spindly legs near a desk with a roll-down cover. at the foot of each bed, a chest. on top of each chest is propped a doll that looks to be made of raw cotton and stuffed with straw, its face painted on in raggedy-anne fashion. it is so quiet and bright. no sound floats up from the library below. i can hear my own breathing perfectly.

i walk softly across the faded blue floor to the window, expecting to look out over the parking lot of our townhouse complex. when i get there, though, i see the view is of a vast meadow, filled with waist high grass and tall yellow flowers. there is a hill that curves down and away and i suspect there is come kind of creek or river that passes by the house just beyond that slope. even further in the distance i see a swatch of trees, deciduous trees that don't belong here in BC at all. i put my fingers on the glass and wonder how to get out there. i know that if i walk back downstairs and out our front door, it really will just be our old townhouse parking lot. this bothers me a lot, and i wake up.