Something in a bottle

 

In my dream, a small, clear, glass bottle filled with something like bird shot - metallic beads -

or maybe sugar sprinkles. But colored like Kaw river water. Then one and then another began to sparkle like ripples on a wind driven river, catching sunlight and it seemed to me like the flashing lights were trying to tell me something.

Sleep, I am told, is when your mind clears out clutter, but jangles and clatter dangle like an

unbarbed hook into waters that first fall from the sky in drips and drabs, dribbling finally in droplets from my dreams.

I awoke more embellished than ever. The cat purred loudly in distraction and my pen seemed to make no more sense than a kite, higher the river flows after the rain falls, brighter the night glows under clouds flooding so low.

Yesterday, I ground cumin seeds and filled two small, clear, glass bottles. I labeled them both but you could smell strongly the spice with the lids off. Cumin grinds the color of cumin.

If there is a point to my dreaming, was it lost in the waking, or did the hunching up of empty phrases leave residues of sense where I hadn’t planned to hide any?

In the water of one moment on a day long ago I made one woman look up the meaning of word because of a poem I made out of simple light splashings. A glance or clear, glass chance, perchance?

It is not truth or even beauty I pursue by abandoning the closing and opening of eyes, or rather peering wildly or blindly.

It is someone to see what I saw and better for you to wonder about what I never saw and for us to see something I mislabeled. And over dinner or distance, we will hold up a glass and then recount the miracle that neither of us knows.

When you look in my eyes are you ever surprised by who you see and when you look at a bottle the color of wine glass, do you see the dapples of starlight?

A candle will do in the evening, crystal or glass will suffice. Look in my eyes and smell the water, mud is turning to light.