Auras

“Hand me a 1909 Hudson and you have a grasshopper
or a butterfly,” she demands in the bar, crazy as
the dream you had last night, where the skin of our
fingers and toes were melted together, not unlike
a remote set of Siamese twins appearing in
a dark Rorshach flower. At the same time

I was dreaming of a Ginger Rogers staircase
leading to the moon and never breaching on
immobility, a coherent perpetual motion machine,
and the room upon which the ivory rail broke
was a long gray and white plateau of glass poetry.
You may have been in a miscarriage in your

dream but I was flown on the arms of my
anatomy teacher (who was bald and resembled an
extremely foolish past lover) and our clasped
hands were never parted as he danced. Only Jesus
could walk between the waters; suffice it to say
we stumble even on the unsettled earth. Rummaging

through the antique furniture of our dreams, you
come to a curtain of blood hung on golden rods,
while my flying, like Dali’s, ends peacefully but
with abrupt consequences. “And even before you
hit the dust, you were already home,” my teacher
says and wisely nods, and I awoke sharply, bewildered,

astounded, thrown out of the dark houses behind our
closed eyelids for some acute misbehavior I’ll never
even recognize in the future. Mike orders a straight
whiskey and Eileen ventures into three more exotic
drinks; then coyly, laughingly, she slowly exposes
her large left breast and its identifying mole . .

We look up at them suspiciously; the terror in our
eyes barks up out of the depths of some inferno. Which
reality—this or the one beyond—is more crazy?

is more crazy, we are asking