sovay | As a matter of convenience, we don't speak of dying gardens

I picked up Seamus Heaney's newest collection, District and Circle, yesterday afternoon in Winchester. Out of all its contents, I think I have fallen in love with "The Tollund Man in Springtime," a sequence of six sonnets in which the famous bog body—like any proper greenman—awakes ("to revel in the spirit / They strengthened when they chose to put me down / For their own good"), collects himself, and proceeds to wander through the modern world:

"The soul exceeds its circumstances." Yes.
History not to be granted the last word
Or the first claim . . . In the end I gathered
From the display-case peat my staying powers,
Told my webbed wrists to be like silver birches,
My old uncallused hands to be young sward,
The spade-cut skin to heal, and got restored
By telling myself this. Late as it was,
The early bird still sang, the meadow hay
Still buttercupped and daisied, sky was new.
I smelled the air, exhaust fumes, silage reek,
Heard from my heather bed the thickened traffic
Swarm at a roundabout five fields away
And transatlantic flights stacked in the blue.

You can see why this sort of thing makes me happy.

I also inflicted one of last night's dreams on

greygirlbeast this afternoon, so that's under the lj-cut for those of you who might or might rather not find out what my subconscious is like these days.

This wasn't the late nineteenth century, because no upstairs room in any Victorian brothel I've ever read about had a bunk bed whose frame was ornate black iron and red velvet on the walls, but she curled on her side on the lower bunk and I don't think the real time mattered that much. On the nearest stretch of floor, one of her girls had been showing me and another customer, if we were customers, if we were not friends or visitors, I can't remember that part, how her fishnet stockings were so intricately knotted as to create patterns like scales and calligraphy when she pulled them on. She laughed and threw me a pair of stockings as she left, tugging the other woman playfully out of the room. There should be gas-lamps high on the walls, over the bureau and the antique chairs, the oval-framed photographs in sepia and the full-color snapshots that don't even make a pretense of illusion, but the sconces hold electric light and the whole room swims in reflected reddish shadow: there is a house in New Orleans . . . She is small, fair-haired, in the buttoned boots and gartered stockings that her anachronism demands, even if her fingernails are painted pearlescent and she has black bead-chains twined through her chignoned hair. No makeup, which is somehow stranger than the tattoos she wears on each shoulder: an grayscale Escher knot on the left, that unravels out of three dimensions if looked at for too long, and some teal-blue ripples on the right that suggest the sea. "You don't have to keep that robe on," she says, and because it's a dream, I hadn't noticed: but I am wearing the same ancient, unraveling bathrobe I keep at home. "This is a whorehouse, not a sleepover party," although her slow smile suggests that if I want to pretend otherwise, she could manage with no effort at all. She opens and closes her hand idly as she speaks, as though she could play this haze and lamplight like a stringed instrument; but her fingers move as bonelessly as anemones, so soft and delicately veined that in that moment I cannot imagine them engaged in any act more carnal than a slow drift in underwater currents. This doesn't register as supernatural or even unusual; I watch this sea-play of her fingers, mesmerized, while she smiles. Then she rolls over and up onto her elbows, and her lips brush very smoothly against mine.

And this was all happening in San Francisco, for some reason I haven't been able to identify. I've since decided that the basics of this dream could well be attributed to yesterday's re-reading of Kij Johnson's "Schrödinger's Cathouse," but the intermittent sea-imagery probably is still all my fault.