Fortress

Broken Dreams

Broken Dreams Anaheim's one black swan can dive through his image and stay down a long time. The white swan waits for him like a stone question mark, and the crowds cross over the drawbridge to the palace between the bright banners, beneath the steel claw that simulates closure because they believe Sleeping Beauty sits up there in her drug-state, forefinger poised above the spindle, hearing the mooring voice of Malificent and waiting to tour Los Angeles like a high thin cloud. Hot, swollen feet. Thousands of them. This morning in line I looked down at a woman's feet. The poor feet, twisted nails untrimmed, a little polish clinging to them, shoved into sandals, waiting for pleasure. The woman wore towing-company overalls, orange writing on the back. My heart hurt, and I heard this snapping. "I don't want the public to see the real world they live in while they are in the park"; Walt Disney drags this sentence forward slowly like the thick stallions pulling trolleys in predestined tracks down Main Street.... The surface layer of the dream is hot. Beneath that, a cold band of sadness. Beneath that, very deep, a coldjoy. You've had to break something open to find it. 9 They rose at dawn, and then they went for pancakes. He eased himself from the plastic booth, jingled the change in his Bermuda shorts while she cleaned the curve of her plate with a fork and released the weak smile, like a warning . . . . Midmorning. Lean against the rented stroller. Watch the perfect couple on a date, taking each other's pictures, exchanging services; fate has made them halves of the same thing. I envy the hyphen, the ampersand, whatever bargain they've made for beauty: the king's son crossing the throne for the casket, the girl in the papers who said she would die for David Bowie; back in the room you are making calls— rippling click as the dial retracts to no one—and you wait for sleep to come. The cogs engage, the cable pulls the dreamcart through the chosen medium: sixteen poison apples and no prince! I only dread that this will not go on, no dear one waiting at the exit waving some small, personal thing . . . . Penny arcade. Plug the nickels into Esmerelda. The amethyst bobs on the headband, the stucco hand selects a prophecy and the old machine vomits this white card: 10 You have been working everyday, eating, drinking, sleeping, a little work and a little leisure, where do you think it all will end? (Not bad, Esmerelda;almost Heideggerian.) You have never adopted any plan without shortly afterward discarding it. Work, economize, save, and you will win great success. One of your lucky numbers is eight. Drop a nickel in slot and I will tell you more. They helped the old man into the long blue boat beneath the spires, the topiary gardens; then, as if part of a burial routine, the relatives got into the boat beside him and entered the arch that was dark with singing . . . . Jung had a dream of carrying a tiny light a long way through fog. —Very fragile, but it was my only light, he said. The young woman loved the Parrot Pierre; I loved her happiness—she lost herself in the invented tropics, the clattering totem poles, and when her baby pulled Louisa's hair, she took the baby's fingers into hers and gently rubbed them, so the baby loved the No. 11 Pure being. She had a face like TuesdayWeld, that falling grace. I wanted to beher— Why is experience so long? hacking the present out of mine-shaft memory; it's not the present that is difficult, and the wrong links of the past can be excised; I only dread that this will not go on, walking in the square beneath the shallow window boxes, blood-drops of the geraniums, gas lamps lighting the tender faces, the men that go before me with their little brooms. The woman in the Citrus House, exhausted, says this is her last time. I suggest she go back to her hotel, have a drink, a swim. Good idea, she says. I stare at the back of her neck. Delicate hairs. Print of her dress quite faded. Birds or something. Ruffles creeping up around the freckles. I can't stop thinking the word Flesh. Flesh...