real dreams

poetry365:

She is about to come. This time, they are sitting up, joined below the belly, feet cupped like sleek hands praying at the base of each other’s spines. And when something lifts within her toward a light she’s sure, once again, she can’t bear, she opens her eyes and sees his face is turned away, one arm behind him, hands splayed palm down on the mattress, to brace himself so he can lever his hips, touch with the bright tip the innermost spot. And she finds she can’t bear it— not his beautiful neck, stretched and corded, not his hair fallen to one side like beach grass, not the curved wing of his ear, washed thin with daylight, deep pink of the inner body— what she can’t bear is that she can’t see his face, not that she thinks this exactly—she is rocking and breathing—it’s more her body’s though, opening, as it is, into its own sheer truth. So that when her hand lifts of its own violation and slaps him, twice on the chest, on that pad of muscled flesh just above the nipple, slaps him twice, fast, like a nursing child trying to get a mother’s attention, she’s startled by the sound, though when he turns his face to hers— which is what her body wants, his eyes pulled open, as if she had bitten— she does reach out and bite him, on the shoulder, not hard, but with the power infants have over those who have borne them, tied as they are to the body, and so, tied to the pleasure, the exquisite pain of this world. And when she lifts her face he sees where she’s gone, knows she can’t speak, is traveling toward something essential, toward the core of her need, so he simply watches, steadily, with an animal calm as she arches and screams, watches the face that, if she could see it, she would never let him see.

I thought most of it. You reflect with an older mind. But the ideas are still there. Memory has substance. It's not nothing.

❉ Not only is “Tangled Up In Blue,” a reference to Joni Mitchell’s album, “Blue,” but Dylan’s New York sessions for “Blood On the Tracks,” features open tunings on the acoustic guitar, reminiscent of “Blue.”

“Joel Bernstein gave me a tape of it, and it was really good, it was really good. But people said, ‘Oh, it’s like a Joni Mitchell album,’ so he went and recut it with his brother in Minnesota. They butchered it all up. They stomped all over it. But originally the writing was different, it was more vulnerable, and the orchestration was subtle, —”

“And one night I had a party here — and Bob crashed it. And the bootleg of that first “Blood On the Tracks,” was playing. They were out in the garden, and somebody said that Bob wanted to see me. And the bootleg was still playing and I said, ‘Why didn’t you put that one out?’ And he said, ‘Somebody stole the tape.’ Which was not true. He chickened out. People said it was like a Joni Mitchell album. There was some stylistic production to it, but not the material. It was more honest. — He took the vulnerability out of it, and in the process he took the depth out. The New York sessions were touching. The Minnesota sessions were not touching at all. He asserted himself again as a man.”