Monday, December 29, 2008

white face

just gonna jump in here - in the middle - the party already starting.
I am on the phone with (I don't think) English Teachers Anonymous (but something like that) - there is someone I can't hear on the other end talking about online assessment.
Valerie Wheeler comes in and with me, still with my ear to the phone (how much of a workaholic am I?) she gives me a present: body of a duck, middle of a lamp, some lampy kinda thing and then a beautiful painted wooden face on top. she says it's very expensive, very much not cheap. it's very valuable, from egypt.

There is a lot of scurrying in the house - people leaving for another place. The sky is wild with weather and they put me in a helicopter for some reason. Though I'm terrified and the sky is churning blue black somehow we get right back to the ground. okay i'm bored won't write about this - the party on the side of Siwa's melting city that they were repairing!!! to look like an amphiteatre - or the girl, at the beginning of the party who sang and then backed up and bumped into the three steps that were next to the pool. She flipped on to her hands, jumped one step up, one down, two up, two down then into the pool. Was it part of her act? She was on the bottom a very, uncomfortably long time. I said I hate this. But she came up. won't write about these things/

I do, though, want to remember riding on the wet freeway - in a bus, I don't know, but somehow open on the top. We approach a cloud that is a giant rectangle, cloud lined on the outside, inside, though, open blue then deeper blue then deepest blue black sky. It's not quite like a funnel, but it has some draw. My body rises up, horizontal,my eyes see white and I say something like "i am lifted' but I hear my voice fade away before I am heard. I feel myself vanishing into my awareness of white and soon I see a face, its eyes blinking. i don't know if it is enormous or if I am simply right in front of it (such is scale). It becomes two faces, attached, hers and mine. Then, just hers. I stare at every feature, exactly as they were - but in the smallest scale of white, off-white. It is sweet and somehow it is not scary or even awful, just what is, when the face turns stiff, cracks, returns to falling flesh (peeling white) and bone. It was then, I think, I actually fell asleep and into the rest.