Yesterday I painted a house but last night I dreamt that I lived in a house with a floor of sand. It stood on a beach where the sky was always gray. The house had only one room, a very large one with two rows of white beds, sheetless twin mattresses stacked together in twos, all in danger of becoming soaked by the incoming high tide, as the ocean extended rivulets like fingers under the door, spreading wider and wider. The other occupants sat on their beds, mute, watching as I dug a whorl-like cavity into the sand, in a vain attempt to contain the ocean.

When I woke, I thought first about my poems, which are not smart poems. They are simple, static, rife with unsure spaces, where I should have thought of a more pungent softer sharper sweeter word.

. . .

Write like a cubist, really, where a match is seen in all aspects of itself, red-haired wood-limbed fire-making candle-lighting darkness-illuminating matchgirl-held sometimes lonely sometimes in a tiny box emblazoned with the name of a restaurant in Paris you went to years ago when you were a young unattached girl with your best friend, there in a drawer with the loose change, rubber bands, and other things we do not think about until we really really need them or sometimes in a matchbook on the toilet waiting for a really good shit, yes, all those qualities of a match should be there, in poems about matches. Qualities of a match specific to my history, the entanglements of time and space that I have known, the way I have seen light flicker on the tip of a scratchedlit match.

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