I enter a Cambridge house
to some extent accidentally,
following a friend? but it turns out
I knew many on the first floor, from varied
parts of life (some invented on the spot
in past tense) a siamese cat glints
like blue-anodized aluminum, but
although hypoallergenic we'd already tried
tufts of its fur (I now remember) at
my house and so I couldn't offer to adopt
it. Children march by with silk patterns of superheroes and stars around their heads,
with simple circlets, hairnets and shining
variety, the red-headed girl asking for
appreciation of the gleam of her hair. I got
the impression they homeschooled here.
For some reason we began climbing the stories; at the top of this atrium yarn was
strung and holding instructional booklets
like upside-down butterflies. A friend who
everyone likes was called by shouting
the name of one of those booklets, I
saw him wake up, disoriented, and begin
to make his way upstairs, passing glares;
at this point I could have felt the mood's shift
towards threatening, but did not.
We continued rising, touring rooms of
people I hadn't seen for a long time,
and of people on this sailboat. Each was
a shipping-container sized fantasy we looked
into from the small end, the first
a Sierra rock slope, like half dome with
a hammock and a giant dinosaur print. The second held a long shiny-lacquered pew
facing medieval armor and brightly lit
broad-leafed plants, and a matte black
beamed ceiling like a nordic church just
before everyone dies of not eating fish.
The room gave the impression of being
a glowing cross, of dominance, of
submission, I was told it was in homage to /
study of an ancient order of knights. My
guides began to speak of policy issues
around housing, how they were worried
about new developments, how really they
should each be so upset as to feel this house
was not somewhere they could recommend. Things began to get baroque, fractal, cancerous. I saw an old friend in the
color scheme of rash-guard swim shirts
(white blue black) that suddenly became her
standard dark-blue lace dress, but with lace
extensions like a sea dragon. There was
a police woman with a rounded blue police cap
who took it off to reveal hair in the same shape
with a lion-rampant pin in front, still in the same place as it had been on the hat. I was aware
that I was waking up, and that these scenes
were wondrous, but was glad to be leaving
through the ceiling, by waking.
