In My Dream

In my dream I had a wife. She was only nine years old. She had been tramping hard through wild country in heavy boots and alpaca vest and held up a hailstone melting in her hand to show me, but the hailstone was also a starfish, and it was melting quickly, and I knew I had to respond quickly with the appropriate word or gesture or. Emissary from sea or sky. The seal of the great king (symbolon para basileos tou megalou). But as a wet wind stroked me with gentle fingers on the side of my neck I stood melting in fear and embarrassment, fear of her impatience, embarrassment at having neglected to get married for so long. How could I have forgot? In the intervening years I had become more than fifty years her senior. Each of your two hands, my little darling, is already like a starfish. And now you hold a real one in your hand, at the beach, to show me. In your star-spangled bathing suit, no less, with the open back and string tie, your salty wet hair glued to your narrow neck in spikes of surprise.

A maid of summery aspect. A summery maid.

Her boots crunched on wet gravel as she climbed the steep driveway towards the rustic house and the dirty white 4X4 pickup truck, bearing messages, destinies, reprieves, royal commands. Her child’s lower body (she seemed to be decreasing in age as she ascended) was clad in the heavy denim of sturdy-legged farm women.