On the Knoll

This is a transcription, without much interference from my meddling morning ego, of a dream I had only minutes before in Magnolia. The box is a sculpture we acquired from Brandon Ndife at Storm King, filled with dirt and totemic symbols right out of the twelve volumes of Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

The box is also a memory of a small paper box I filled with dirt and twisted Krummholz twigs from the top of Captain Merit’s Hill behind my childhood house in Mt. Kisco. I gave this box to my father as a Christmas present, and he was very polite, although I think it convinced him to send me off to military school, which my mother fought against until she died from a brain tumor and I was shipped off, through the intervention of my grandfather, to a boarding school. My grandfather knew how to manipulate my father; he simply paid for everything. Thus my camera, my books, my bookshelves, my records, my record player, my piano, boarding school, college. The only thing my father paid for was the world tour from which I don’t think I was supposed to return, as every destination was one in flames. 1964 was a year of unrest, after the assassination of Kennedy unmoored the world from two decades of Pax Americana.

The car my grandfather bought me was a VW bus, which is in this dream. Also here is our Colorado mountain house on its slight bench above the summer meadow where we hay and fish.

As a child I sporadically wrote E. A. Wallis Budge at the British Museum about his hieroglyphic dictionary (Budge kindly wrote me back). The indigenous artists around our art center in southern Montana are here also; their resurrection of ancient totems fuse together with my fascination with ancient Egypt, so that simple sticks and circles tie the land in with the sky, adding mysticism to Captain Merit’s Hill. The hill was an hour’s climb up from our neighborhood, and I would wander like Renfield through its witchy knieholz as the shadows shifted shapes around me.

The widow is Cathy, so the poem is about my death, Celtic stalwart that I am, although my elliptical references are nothing like Wyeth’s obsession. Death comes to me filtered distantly through the broken spectacles of Eisenstein, the metaphysics of Dylan Thomas and John Donne. Although I might like to feign some distance from my dreams, they admittedly revert to a six-year-old trembling in his isolated garret, surrounded with Gothic novels and hieroglyphics, the turrets of our neighborhood castle illuminated in the fuliginous sunset out my bedroom window. I notice from this simple description that my cervical cortex might have been mired in Transylvanian swamps at an early age, and how the savage fires which spring from Michelet and Walpole have been uninterruptedly fanned by an inner diet of vampires and Jesuitical arguments about divine immanence. We all live more in the Piranesian myths of our fantasies than in the drab parking lots of a dragon-free world. Reality is just a placeholder until we get back to sleep.