jump in the line, okay, i belive you

Somebody Called Henry Miller (Prose Poem)

Worried about a dream she had with Henry Miller in it. Said he was bashing me with an andiron in the dream, pounding me along the kitchen floor: 'He's not going to cross over, he's gotten himself embedded in his past, he's given up to it, he's useless, ' Miller said to her, wiping his mouth with a volume of Proust, not touching me with his proof-reader's hands covered with larva and ink, covered with chicken drippings and rosemary swabbed from our oven― and not bringing me near his puny chest bulging with spittle and roots, or poking me with Hermes' wand for the dead either, but a vulgar messenger with an andiron, an earthly tool to stir burning logs or ashes with and kept saying to her in the dream, kept reassuring her what he was doing 'had to happen' and for her to 'stay out of it.' So Henry Miller, who doesn't hold your hand with his tit, but points you down to the hole your life comes out of, the hole you're supposed to dig back through the bottom of as much as necessary, so Miller was pounding me down on the beige tile, maybe for not going to the bottom which, in a sense, makes me nothing because I couldn't go or stop him. And I look at that without any excuses. 'Stunted' and 'unconscious' is what he said. Not even between nerve and the failure of nerve, I thought. So that maybe I was weak in that dream for some farther-out reason I couldn't get to, maybe never get to, maybe there is only the self that leads up to getting beaten along the floor and there is no other side. But wait a second, it was a dream, I said to her, your dream, and you can believe that because somebody might be walking with a twisted-up kneecap, or a caved-in eardrum, somebody might be walking ugly who came at me like that, I said. But I think the violence that happened in the dream was right: it wasn't the violence that breaks down a life but re-orders it, even if it was your dream, your omen, your instruction, not mine. And because it's yours, I said, maybe you're him, that is, someone symbolic of you in that dream, or you're seeing me or something about me or the me in yourself you can't otherwise look at, and so must embody in a dream in someone else to be warned by. Maybe those are the signals, and you want to come on like a jail guard who controls the promise of some passage out. And maybe, I said, it's all on the condition neither of us says a thing about getting pounded across the floor and why someone like my self or your self won't resist, or can't. But how convenient not to be you on the beige tile and then report the dream about me as a kind of accusation. Do you think the dream is about serving someone wrong and there's a price for being a valet like that or making someone a valet? I don't remember who said that. Maybe we should resist nothing, maybe we shouldn't even look like we are more than the sides of ourselves we get whacked down to, she said. All I said was we should look at it, your dream. But I don't go for the way it was presented to me as a judgment. And I'm thrown off about it, and I'm not sure why, but I would like while we are looking at it for you to please back off.

Doren Robbins