A summation of days, nutshelled and cracked open:
I count them out in dreams, pale wisps that float at my periphery..
The First – I find a strange new species of carnivorous plant-
They resemble tiny blunt trees and shift colours
iridescently as if made of mercury and peacock ore,
moving in a slow, gelatinous way.
Mlle. Threne is going to meet me for Thai food and chocolate,
only I’ve forgotten she lives so far away.
I’m looking for more of those lovely plants
and instead find an old trunk filled with
the books and photographs and gold teeth
and the bloodmoney. Someone is raving,
in a mad froth at old deeds, left undone.
The Second – I am walking in a tunnel with Mlle. K__
It opens out onto an artificial brook or stream..
It becomes difficult to describe the formation of the water,
but it was as if it had walls, or was somehow solidly shaped
and also coloured a rusty tangerine shade.
You could see the shadows of large, slow-moving fish
moving through the orange sheets of water-
At intervals it was pierced through with sunlight
and their brilliantly metallic colours became visible..
The Third – In which I was shown how the world would end.
This one I had while curled up in the back of the car,
driving back from Texas. It was early morning, and mist
was thick and white over the swamps and cypress stumps..
This may have been my most vivid and frightening dream to date-
I have never been so perfectly aware of imagined physical sensations before.
I am standing next to the car on a deserted country road,
bending over and stretching my legs- smelling the early morning
scent of dew on dry grass, asphalt, cattle; very clean and familiar.
As the first reverberations of an immense impact are felt,
first my legs, and then the road turn to rubber.
I cannot unbend; it’s as though I have been punched in the stomach
with a lead weight- my body is taffy and I am choking, shaking, suddenly deaf..
I don’t know what’s happened exactly, only that nothing looks changed yet-
but everything feels it, at the most base level.
It’s amazing that I am not killed instantly-
that I am still standing and have not yet
disengorged all of my internal organs.
The laws of physics exact a slow torture-
the smash, the reeling all happening so slowly
that I have time to be sick, and wonder..
I hold my knees and look east, towards the sunrise
and enormous rose clouds of dust exploding upwards..
The horizon roars and rolls forward, an earth tsunami-
I can see it coming over the hills, the road buckling
and running towards me.
This is how the world ends.
Earth covers earth.

“I knew nothing of the horses, nothing of the thresher..”