Beginning Stage


I drive 30 minutes north of Seattle for a class on medicinal herbs—I am undergoing a nervous breakdown because you do not want me. The class is on a homestead. It will be therapeutic. When I arrive--20 minutes late--I have to pee. I walk behind the empty house, in perfect sunshine, thinking of how the body ages and dies, and I find the students in boots and waist-high grass by a virile stream. Class has started. The herb specialist is pointing to a slender emerald plant and describing it, what ailments it soothes, what relief the diamond shaped leaves can provide. My heart patters. They wait for me to run inside. She tells us later the cottonwood is her favorite tree.

I snap pictures amidst our clamoring through the forest. Sudden expressive meadows stretch into Canada, in black and white. The teacher has regal silver hair, which I cannot distinguish later in the colorless prints.

She offers me a hug and it reminds me of you, your teacherly, womanly affections and for a moment I am in a golden veined non-space, non-time.

*

Between Awake (Stage 1) and Asleep (Stage 2) is a transitional world, where consciousness and unconsciousness exchange potent artifacts.


Here the smell of cottonwood, here a professor who will lance you, here the vermillion hallway you would be a fool not to turn down. Or, alternately, a fool to turn down.


Stage 2, “quiet sleep” is characterized by the activity of theta waves. In animals, theta waves occur when running, jumping, sniffing, and when freezing in the presence of a predator. The faster an animal runs, the denser the formation of theta waves.

**

6/19/2013


Nine school children are shot to death in Nigeria. A spokesperson for the militant group, Boko Haram, tells journalists the act was meant to punish children for “supporting the army.”


(As if such a thing could even begin to explain…) Maybe that day a flock of moonbirds took flight.


Hey, I meant to tell you: young ghosts are most sad, most ferocious. Insistent as plant-life.


I’ve survived gunmen three times, have seen the minute details of the onyx door I am to push open. (The same way I can vividly, urgently recall the exact cast and texture of your hand. Tapping the desk, wondering whether or not to believe me.) Nightly resuscitations; I try telepathy. In our omnipresent conversation my xoxoxoxoxo thoughtpebbles strike mutely the little peonies you draw with a dry-erase marker in the windows of your resistance.


I beam you all night.

***

Sleep spindles – bursts of brain activity. A city is discovered in remote Cambodia. Mahendraparvata—cousin of the Angkor Wat temples, located by shooting laserbeams from an aircraft into the jungle. I feel the deep green of discovery in my cerebellum, stardust of sleep…


"you have this sudden eureka moment where you bring the data up on screen the first time and there it is - this ancient city very clearly in front of you,” says one of the scientists.


(Synapse, echo-location,


radio alarm clock.)

****

Six months ago, twenty 5 and 6 year old students are massacred in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. I make myself study the faces of each child, resuscitating them for the breadth of a moment, here, their images glowing on my rawlate, milkbright computer screen. I am barely awake. Their interests and characteristics are the interests and characteristics of small children.
What does fear appear like? Chaos. Little bones. (And what does peace resemble?) Everything on earth mapped, penetrated, but the shadow of death remains infinitely abstract. (In my nightmares I am shaking, drowning, sputtering on water. I tumble paralyzed into iterations of rape and regret.)


Between Stage 3 and Stage 4 is another transitional zone, where light sleep ends and deep sleep begins.

**

Turiya, or pure consciousness, and “sleep yoga” occur in Stage 4. Delta waves, a liquidgold brain-bath that sieves for memories.


• Hurricane Andrew descends on South Florida in 1992. My mother and step-father sleep
naked with the wild window open and the AC off. I am six, I watch from the doorway. I
can smell something like doom as it slides blackgreen into the yard.


• The “Wings of Asia” Aviary at the Miami-Dade zoo is destroyed, 300 tropical aviary
birds lost.


• Any moment now a “mega-quake” from the Cascadia fault, a seam of under-earth where
the North America plate meets and converges over the Juan de Fuca. Violent bones
armor the earth and its coyote-cloud is always there where you live, or is projected to be
soon. I think in a spare closet in your home are jugs of water, kerosene, canned goods.
Flashlights. Batteries. Hostages.

*****

Dreaming is the final stage, though we cycle here repeatedly. The mind is active but the body is bound. I live 4,000 miles away from you now, and you do not wish to speak to me.


In case you did not know: In Seattle, gay marriage is legal now. In Florida, it is not, and everything that entails.


(The moment first free of a nightmare: monkey arms grappling through space, cutting through dreamwater.) I’m falling asleep faster and faster, the rooms in which to meet you glint mint green, like the tree sliver, the gleamspot. The “hurricane alley” between the Bahamas and Canada. My peace-cradle.


A person woken during REM will be weary throughout the day. You think of children and relief, relief and children. You cradle a child to sleep, and then she is gone.


Every night I transfigure, a dark young woman becoming a crane. Each night I stalk you on inverted legs through an uprooted orchard until someone starts shooting. And each night when I am hit, water closes over a breast-plate of skin, feather and bone.


Works Cited:

Samuels, Jonathan. “Cambodia: Lost Ancient City Found in Jungle.” Sky News: 18 June 2013.

<http://news.sky.com/story/1105062/cambodia-lost-ancient-city-found-in-jungle>