I
 
                             I’ve known for quite some time now that I’m forgetful, especially about my dreams. The majority, I simply can’t remember.
                            Odd details, ragged snapshots, a narrative cut short, that’s what remains. What I did during those still, nocturnal hours in
                            bed or what others did to me are secreted away. But where? The assiduous complexity of dreaming slips through my fingers.
                            
                            So I’m at my desk tonight trying to remember. Even with spring, so new and fresh with its cherry, lavender, and plum
                            blossoms, the strange heady scent of anise in the park earlier on, does little to help.

                            Muffled, regular breathing: It comes, goes. Then it comes again.  Has my wife gone to bed so early? Perhaps. At dinner
                            she mentioned how exhausting it was to make her way through the city and how difficult it was to do what she wanted. The
                            coarse, alienating conflictive pressures of the street…

                            What time is it? Have I lost sense of the hour, too? Am I overlooking something I said or she said, or what we didn’t say, or
                            what they, whomever they are, said?  I cannot answer these questions. I can only trace words out that satisfy and dissatisfy:
                            my words… from late middle age.

                            I don’t know why I mention that. Chronology is usually a device to inculcate clichés in whatever I can get down on paper. Time
                            is no ally. I’ll return to bed soon and close my eyes. Scents, subtle mirages, opaque distempers, crowns of dust, vagrant anger,
                            cruel jokes, scripts from a former life, drowned affections, wires in code… Once upon a time…
 
                            These are the contours of the dreams I cannot remember; the elusive landscapes of sleep. There, refracted by my words, tiny
                            devilish parachutes that drop onto the face I face, that blank empty face of the dream. It escapes. Not me.
   
                            And for a moment, so quickly passing, tears swell in my eyes. Does it turn within these words, hollowing them out from the inside,
                            so that they, too, drop off and I’m left with little more than air, empty air…?
 
                            II
 
                            A week on I read these notes. I imagine I am sleeping then dreaming. Scenes transpire and vanish; the scratch of the pen on
                            paper, my pen, their leitmotif. Is there anything else? There is nothing else. I wake, I dream, I take a pen and begin to write. Are
                            they words I have written? Do these words write me as I write them?
 
                            By leaps, lapses, loss, I endure.
  
                            I find another word. It shimmers then dies out.
 
                            Masked, mute letters…
 
                            Bitter, poisonous ash…