Eye, Appaloosa

I realize this title is a bit strange, but it came from a dream I had last night. It was very fresh in my mind when I woke up, so I remembered some of the language pieces. The dream included my friend M., who is just starting her first IVF cycle. She is only 30–a babe in the woods in IF circles–and has every chance in the world of succeeding. We are all very hopeful for her.

But the dream wasn’t about IF, at least, not on the surface; on the surface, it was about writing poetry–we are both poets. In the dream, we both had writer’s block (although probably a stand-in for infertility?). We hadn’t written for months (very true IRL in my case). Then her husband got a new job at Nebraska (true IRL) as their department poet, and she felt competitive and started writing furiously–typing while I collected her pages. There was a clock on the wall in the dream, and she turned out about 75 pages of beautiful poetry in an hour. I was reading the pages, and they were perfect, Ashberyesque poetry about the forest, rocks, river, animals. She divided them into three perfect sections–I can’t remember any specific lines, but they were edgy and raw and long, even though they invoked leaves and rocks and so forth. She told me I had to come up with a title for her, so here are the three that I invented in the dream for her:

Eye, Appaloosa
Cowhand, Traveller, Cow
The Gift of Green.

Interestingly enough, IRL she plans her poetry collections as colors; her first, The White Nightgown, is obviously white; the second she had just told me will be Verdigris because she sees it as a green book–so the third dream title must be a reference to that. The overwhelming color in the dream was green–the green trees in the forest. I was apparently “seeing” the poems as I was reading them in the dream. I just kept exclaiming that she had a whole book done in an hour. Clearly, the dream was manifesting my insecurities about not writing recently: I could never do that, I was thinking.

I have a feeling, however, that the dream was really about IF. After all, it was a creative act, M.’s writing an entire book of poetry. And there it was, perfect, not needing edits, all in an hour. And the overwhelming feeling I had was: I could never do that.