for a minute there

a disturbing dream wakes me up, just slightly too warm in the bed, 6am hazy, too-bright-already sunday in a san francisco june. the fog is folding in, sluicing down the bowl of the east bay, emanating from a gently throbbing sun, obscured two layers back in the fog, an unwrapped duvet, a creamy but ephemeral composite, creeping through the spires and guard-wires of the bridge, imperceptibly, caressing its laddered peaks as wisps of backlit fluff drift past from the south, gathering and consolidating all around (physics as a conspiratorial, social function) until the glass box around me is suddenly – afloat.

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a new grove

I’d never find my way back here on my own – if I follow someone else all the cardinal directions vacate my senses, as if they were actually a reflection of my volition, of my body making its own choices – a grove somewhere deep in the park, eucalyptus-battered sunlight falling into a deep basin of incongruous reeds, lying fully flat on a sun-warmed fallen trunk, base of my skull not uncomfortably wedged against an aborted branch nub, a freudian chaise longue made of crumbly red bark. For the first time in months, I feel myself, my own self, unguarded scream-laughing self.