I never took my true heart, I never wrote it down

Mostly what I remember from last night's dreams is a film I was watching on my computer (with a stranger who had suddenly replaced a casual friend of mine, but that's another story), one of whose protagonists was a grey-barred bird that had been human once. Or perhaps he was still human, only bird-shaped; he sounded like anyone else when he spoke and none of his friends seemed to care. I remember someone saying, after a minor setback of the sort that looks devastating when you've got nothing else going on, "That went down like a gull tied to a bathyscape," but it wasn't especially significant of an avian motif. It was kind of a plotless movie, lo-fi, digital video, acting probably best described as mumblecore, except for the last scene. The five protagonists are walking over downland, following the sunken line of a stream among the timothy and the bedstraw, when a hawk strikes the bird in the back like a bullet. He falls at the damp place in the grasses, which is almost like a beach-edge with the gravel (now that I'm awake, it must have been flint); only a little blood shows through his feathers, hooked deeply in between his wings. Two darkly slicked human hands part the bird's back, as if emerging through a taut curtain, and soon there is a naked man lying at the center of a shallow crater—its shape a little like a snow angel, a little like the first shadow you learn to cast with both hands on a wall—exhausted and feather-flecked, still glistening the grainy black of crude oil. But then the camera angle widens and you see that while his friends who stand gazing at him, a little clay tableau as the wind ruffles the downs, are still dressed as casually as the moment before, their skins have become white and soft, black-dashed, their eyes round and ringed as owls or kachinas, flat-faced except for the small, predatory beak. Grey pinfeathers in their hair. The film stopped there. I woke up thinking of The Fall (2006).

I really wanted to finish my Turing poem before I saw Breaking the Code at the Central Square Theater tomorrow afternoon, but I don't think it's going to happen. This has been what people call a week.

(R.I.P. Sidney Lumet.)