The Golden Man

Fitst of all, I awoke before dawn singing "For the Beauty of the Earth.." One momment I was asleep and aware of nothing, and the next I was awake, and filled withthis song. Only I was stumped on a verse, and so was making it up as it went along..

For the Beauty of each hour, for the Sun and for the Moon,
for the blossom of each flow'r, for the Ocean's tide and swoon,
Lord of All to Thee we raise
this our Hymn of grateful Praise.."

I Love this song, and have always sung it, since I was a child.

There is music in my head all of the time. Every day. There is always music.
I used to marvel when I was about twenty, as I could choose entire works and listen to them in my mind. I thought this was like pressing the play button on a tape machine. Nowadays, it is very much like an iPod with its files and files of music. I used to play a game with myself on the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and listen to albums in my head.

Some days, I play a game with the music in my head still. I just jot down all of the songs that pop in throughout the day. Alot of them are hymns. I always loved hymns. They comfort and assure me.

My husband came in and kissed me good-bye, he had an early srtat today. I went back to sleep.


Later, I awoke with vague running recollections like flashcards of a dream I was in.

Iwas looking out the window of a studio apartment and realised that I did not recognise the street below! I went to another window and looked out. This vantage point looked out over a hillside, which lowered in steps, like little terraces. On the first one I saw the shape of a large dinosaur down among the trees, which were a little taller than eye level, from where i was standing in my apartment, looking out the window. The sun was filtering through the leaves, and it was a very beautiful day. Soon I could make out the actual shape of the dinosaur, and saw that it was a sculpture made of pressed sheet metal that was stamped with a grid pattern like you see on those big silver tool boxes welded to the backs of Ford trucks! It was bronze coloured. As I looked more closely, I could see that its feet were actually wheel wells, and its horns on top were foglamps! Its snout was the front cab of a hollowed out truck! Then, to my amazement, a man came around and got into the driver's seat. He was wearing a hard hat, and he was completely gold! It was as though he were made of shimmering golden sand! He was like a moving particle sculpture! He started the truck and looked as though he was going to drive, but I had turned and run to the doorway!

I rushed to the hallway and down the stairs to the outside: it had changed again! I rounded the corner of the building, and it had changed again! I was now inside a convenience store/gas station! I went outside into the parking lot and looked out over the hill where I had seen the golden man. There were a number of men working there now, with shovels and rakes and wheelbarrows. They were landscaping tarraces.

I stood, dumbfounded. People were coming and going, and it was just like being at the Marathon station down any street. Then I was stricken with a kind of panic, and suddenly remembered that my baby had been napping upstairs! I raced around to the doorway I had come out of, and nearly ran into an Asian man holding two babies, and I touched their little backs, patted them as I went by. I then began to panic, because the door was already gone, and the side of the building had turned into a boarded up and graffiti'd warehouse, along which the street I had been standing beside had turned into an alley in a city that went under a raised train track.

I looked up at the windows, trying to recognise my little studio. Then I saw a series of images like looking at a roll of film negatives from a movie. It fastforwarded, leaving choppy impressions in my mind's eye, like the staggered speed of animation. Eventually it landed on a woman and a man asleep in a bed. She had a sort, modern haircut. It was all back in time, but it was monochromatic, in sepia tones.