from Century of Clouds
I like the bigness of things, their largeness. Dreaming my favorite dream I'mflyingabove an enchanted forest, arms stretched out wide. The trees are emerald green and the fields under me ordered in neat yellow squares. They shout and compete with each other for the splendor of it. High above me there's a clear sapphire sky. Oh the serenity! Now I shift the bones of my wrist and slightly turn. Facing the sun I begin my descent. In the years of friendship I see those I love in mosaic-like patterns, and me along with them. Who will ever know our names in a hundred years! We're like the catalogs of flora, and moving toward a brilliant future. Wave upon wave of collective life displaying ever new patterns. Like the stripes of sea bass; like the desert cactus in bloom after years of waiting. It's spring, and the acacias are beginning to carpet the streets with their yellow polleny fuzz. Patterns, designs, excesses I love. At night I look up to emptiness, and the Milky Way is a ribbon of distant faces turned outward, still asleep. Will they wake? At the institute last summer I dreamt for several nighrs about Fred's repeated anecdote. By sheer coincidence, he says, when three had come together, Sartre is the first to speak.'Three little men!' — and a smile to Picasso and Charlie Chaplin. I dream they're in a circle looking down, peering into and beyond something. But it's there at their feet. I wake up and laugh. I have to tell Fred this! He's so large, like the world. Everyone will enjoy my dream joke.
* > j< There's an explosion when I think these thoughts. Letelier is being blown up in his car by the agents of Chilean reaction. The sound of nearly silent bullets — and 9 black men are dead in Oakland from police assassination. Racism; poverty. Lives of women and gays oppressed in patriarchy. Daily violence done to workers. A workers' movement now bloody and sundered with wounds. These thoughts large and public, how to relate them to my life? How to link with experience and touches — only rarely — my past? To tell about desiring too. Perhaps beginning to tell you stories. Some important friendships, in between spaces as my life moves outward. Problems. Questions. •
