I dreamed in negative exposure, of a room where night and light sound nothing alike and so are not balanced in opposition. A room expelled from a children’s story because its clock won’t go ticktock and there’s no hat for cat nor a spoon to reflect the moon. The only illumination, a levitating dress, a handkerchief bidding farewell from a steamer, the gossamer curtain suspended on the thermal of a hissing radiator.
Beyond the curtain, a window open onto outer space.
Beneath stars like those that Dante sees again—a riveder le stelle—when he emerges from the Inferno, she led the blindered horses of childhood from a burning barn and woke to a momentary scent of cigar smoke.
– from the beginning of Pink Ocean by Stuart Dybek in the January 2008 issue of Poetry magazine
-Julie
