2 WAYS - LIKE COUNTRY - BATTLE LINE ROAD

75. 2 WAYS - LIKE COUNTRY - BATTLE LINE ROAD:

It was in the course of dreaming that I awoke from dreaming I was awake that I realized I'd just been dreaming everything - and there was butter in the cup and all the ice had melted and two terriers were to my right both lapping at the bowl while someone named David Kane was blowing a piccolo sounding like a soldier from some very old war and there was a rag tied around his head and another bloody rag around the top of one arm and although I couldn't place any of that I accepted what I saw (not questioning authority is often engrained) and he said he was from Delaware - which I'd already known - and then I realized who he was (an old room-mate from seminary school) and I soon understood why he was there : he'd brought me a selection of old photos he'd taken from the parade field where the marshalls lined up and he'd been rehearsing some part in a skit about war and then - as he broke down telling me - he'd forgotten how to get out of the character he was playing and now couldn't get out but I extended my hand and pulled him back to THIS and we looked at those photos together : commingling memories as it were and trying to understand how far LIFE had gone on and then he started talking once again about something (whatever anything all I heard) - "good grub on Guatemala Avenue" he said and I replied "where the hell is that?" and he replied "somewhere in San Francisco I think but really I've forgotten or never knew" and I told him to "put the book down or forget to be pretending and get on with this entire silly matter" to which he replied "'Is she an Egyptian dancer?...in the first blue hours will she destroy herself like deceased flowers...before the brilliant expanse where we feel the enormously flourishing town exhale?' - that's Rimbaud did you know?" and I couldn't tink of anything to say but muttered "'to think that drinking wasn't even on my mind?' - that's Rimbaud too - the last line of 'Larme' a stupidly weird poem which also has the line 'as I was I would have made a miserable sign for a hotel' - which has always struck me as a mishmash of modern lingo in a poem where it never did fit in" and as that much really was true I at least felt we were getting somewhere.