Dinner for One
i
Horizon to horizon, one-hundred and eighty degrees of ocean horizon . . . what then must I say? How up equals down horizontally; but how vertically, of course, it is another thing; up is up and down is down but not down is up or up is down—get it? I do.
ii
I see the Parachute Jump as we approach Coney Island. We are entering the Coney Island/Stillwell Avenue Station of the D. I exit onto the platform and look down the block past Nathan’s to the boardwalk and the beach. I see the waters of Jamaica Bay.
iii
I have a fractured sense of right and wrong. Everything I have known about right and wrong has fallen to pieces like a jigsaw puzzle collapsing after having been hung on a wall for too long in a cheap frame. I have fractured the bones in my arms several times. Pieces, slivers, chips go flying as the vase falls and shatters.
iv
Someone once told me that the psychic depths of the human-being are Nature. I still do not know what that means. I have the feeling that I should wish I did know more about that, and that perhaps it would be a very good thing for me to be able to say something about that. I no longer know if that is true; I am not sure that I ever did know enough about that to discern the usefulness or the uselessness of knowing or not knowing. Do we want to know who is within; the demon always says that he is the one who dwells within–or is it that he says he is the one that dwells within? I know that they are legion, or that the demon says We are legion.
v
I had a dream the other night where in the dream I dreamed a dream where I was in search of a soul, and that when I woke in the dream I had tried to discern what it meant for me to have been in search of a soul, and also wondered if it were my soul I was searching for, one I had had and lost, or one that had never grown in the soil of the life I had chosen or grown in the depleted soil of my society as I know now I would have thought. What I recall now is that when I woke from the dream I had, dreaming a dream where I was in search of soul, I had no idea what I was really in search of, and thought about what if the soul were one soul and what if the soul I was in search of was another . . . and then I paused. Sound and pause. Sound without pause is cacophony.
vi
And then I stopped thinking altogether about what I had been thinking. I continued to randomly pass images in the mind; I continued to play hop-scotch with words in my head, imagining them reverberating in my skull; and then I thought about what I was going to have for dinner, and I decided that I was going to have a portobello mushroom omelette, remembering that I had bought the mushrooms yesterday and had better get to them.
I’ll have what’s left of the Albarino, a Galician white I’ve acquired a taste for from two Galician restauranteurs in bay Ridge, I did not say but thought without the words.
The Falling Leaf Review 