Dream Fragments

Mayor Giuliani,

The world has a logic.

If your cops
shoot enough (unarmed)
black men,

the KKK
will march
in Manhattan—

the same way
if a band plays music
someone will dance.

Yours truly,
Sparrow

October 30
A bird outside my window makes the exact sound of a rubber squeeze toy.

Not Funny: A Play Fragment
Sam: It’s not funny! All these jokes are not funny.
Mark: But if jokes aren’t funny, what is?
Sam: I’ll tell you what’s funny. A dog barking at an owl in a tree. That’s funny.

Tree of the Month
Regular readers of this column know that each month features a particular tree found in this area. This month we highlight the Protzman pine.
The Protzman pine is a tall, nervous tree found on ridges of very old mountains. Its leaves are shaped like knitting needles, in bunches of five. This tree is extremely sensitive to wind, and its boughs tremble at the slightest breeze. The roots grow straight and hard, and were used for flutes and the axles of broughams.

October 31
I dreamed my wife is having an affair with a ghost named Crawdalon.

An Art Review
“I understand Sparrow is reviewing an art show he is in!”
“That is completely unethical.”
“Indeed, Sparrow is the most unethical art critic in the Hudson Valley!”
At Upstate Art’s “Fall: Group Show”, Christie Scheele’s brooded seen-through-a-fence landscapes posit the theory that earth is the belly of the sky. Wendy Klein’s “rain of meat” sculpture (“Group”) bestows carnivore luck on a segment of the porch. Laura Levine’s avowals of love for 3-D cartoons (monkey figurines from the 1930s, globe-clowns) bespeak a hirsute inner wisdom. Ric Dragon’s large fleshy abstractions (“Untitled”) appear to be miniatures of something extremely huge. Amy Hill’s Renaissance portraits of “Metal Men” are like wordless business cards for Bikers without Business Cards. And David Chambard’s boat of saints (“Ten Aboard and a Holy Man”) reassures us that the journey from Phoenicia to Paradise will be smooth.
But most surprising are the poems by Sparrow, mounted on black mortarboard—unexpectedly sage, delicate and hoary. Here are a sampling:

Bear Riding

Bear riding, I love you!
Any two bears, I will ride.

One leg on each, one leg on each.
Bears, carry me away!

God

God doesn’t give a fuck about morality.
God is an Outlaw.

He does what He pleases when He pleases.

If He needs a mountain, He cooks one up.
Then He explodes it.
It’s all a joke to Him.

God had a son but He killed him.
Subway

The man next
to me falls
asleep,
and his Greek
newspaper hits
the floor

4/30/97 3:00PM

Upstate Art is at 60 Main Street in Phoenicia.
914-688-9881.
upart@ulster.net

The Sweater: A True Story
My sister gave me a sweater for Hanukkah. It had a tan and black design—a skiing pattern. As a substitute teacher at Bainbridge High School, I was surprised to see a student with the same sweater.
One day a string hung from the left sleeve. The next day the sleeve began to unravel. By the end of the week the sleeve was bisected up to the armpit.
I could no longer wear the sweater to school. So I drove to Stewart Airport in Newburgh, and left the sweater on a bench near the taxis.

November 8
Dream: I see a photo of Andy Warhol with an erection. His dick is enormous (the size of an arm)!

November 9
I lie in the bath and try to remember if Paul McCartney is alive.

A Meeting

One day I received a phone call: “This is Collins. I heard you were looking for me. I’ll be standing on Fluke Road.”
I jumped in my Buick and drove to Chichester. Next to Fluke Road was a man in a black frock coat. He had a stubbly black and white beard.
“Are you Collins?” I asked. He nodded.
I parked my car and followed him. He walked into the woods, to a small clearing. He kicked away some leaves. Beneath the leaves was a hole. Then he lit two candles and handed one to me.
The hole descended at a 40 degree angle. We entered. To my left, coins were mounted on the earth wall, on divots. They gleamed in the candlelight. One, I saw, was a Danish pfennig. Another was a French half-franc. The third was a Swedish kroner. The fourth was a Finnish veln. The fifth was a Hungarian pesh. The sixth was a Scottish shilling.
At one point the tunnel grew smaller and steeper. Above this new entrance was a wall on which a painting hung: a portrait of a man with a white beard, in a suit jacket.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“A farmer named Jenkins. They say he killed his wife.”
At the bottom of the new tunnel was a small room with a round table, two chairs and a dresser.
“Would you like some water?” Collins asked.
“Yes.”
He produced a pitcher of water and poured some into an empty peanut butter jar. I sat and drank. The water was ice cold, and tasted of lime. The room was extremely quiet.
“When you live underground, you think of rhymes,” Collins explained. “Would you like to hear one?”
“Yes.”
“Under the store/there was a door.”
“Very good,” I responded.
Then he asked, “Do you want a cinnamon roll?”
“Certainly.”
From the bureau, he removed a cinnamon roll and two bathroom tiles. With a rusted saw, he cut the cinnamon roll in half, and gave us each half. We ate the roll.

A Robbery
I was walking down East 17th Street (in Manhattan) at 1 a.m.—I’d just seen a Murmur concert at Irving Plaza—when two guys approached me. One said, “That’s it!”
“That’s it!” I knew meant I was being robbed.
These were large, jovial guys. One had a beard and carried a curtain rod.
How humiliating to be robbed at curtain rod-point! But I felt that the unbearded one would hold me down while the other bludgeoned me with the curtain rod until my head broke.
“Give us your bank card,” said the unbearded one.
I handed him my card, and he moved over to the side of a building, where they had erected a small machine with two slots, a series of wires and a digital pad. He slipped my bank card in one slot, and his own bank card in another. Then he hit the keypad. “I am extracting $300 from your account,” he explained cheerfully. “There is no way to trace this.”
After 10 seconds he handed me back my card and said, “Have a nice night.”
Then they gathered up the apparatus and moved down the street.
At home, I called the emergency number for my bank, and left a message on an answering machine in Dallas. Then I slept, and had a series of cruel dreams involving sheep.