Changing My Blood

A dream came to me. I was standing at the edge of the sea. The ocean drew back, exposing tidal shoals filled with anemones, starfish, clams, long strands of kelp, crusty barnacles, pronged feet of crabs.

Suddenly, a great wave rose up in a massive green curl, engulfed me, and dragged me under. The current pulled me down, farther and farther out to sea. Everything was upside down. The bottom of the ocean lay above.

The cold clear blue current pulled me past skeletons and skulls, an inventory of lies, every moment wavering in fear and dishonesty a broken skeleton, tens of thousands of femurs and vertebrae scattered across the sea floor overhead. Gems glistened in the eye sockets of crania that looked, from below, like a firmament spread wide with mushrooms and eggshells, in convex position. Long-haired figures resembling human beings crowded around clefts in the ocean bottom, which remained above; they swayed in the shifting currents, like grasses on a sleeping prairie. I made no effort to resist or swim; the current was showing me everything I needed to see.

The current carried me along toward two trees. Nearer and nearer, and there I saw a tall Douglas Fir and a twisted Bristlecone Pine, their roots anchored in the floor of the ocean, arching above my head, the ocean's dark deeps below. Closer now, and the fir transformed into an old man with a shock of white hair; the bristlecone turned into an old woman with grey-green eyes. They turned to me with open faces of recognition, as if they'd been waiting. I could hear singing. He rolled the harmony around deep in his chest, and she sang lyrics that stayed with me as I woke up: “Grow down as rain, wounded healer. Grow down like rain, and the rivers flow through ye.”

Lo and behold, she was right. I woke up needing to pee.