The stairs are blocked by steel rails; I can’t access them from this side. She’s told me my keys are down below, where the party was.

I remember being surrounded by women for a brief instant.

I’d shouted — something I don’t remember.

She’s caught the trolley off to work. This little English town, asleep, and asleep.

In bed she’d been some different woman, one I tried to escape. I don’t know if I did.

Now back to London in the dark.

I’d cried out from pleasure, and relief. But what had I thought would happen, coming here? Here where every relief is a deeper kind of pain. We keep track.

All in a long tunnel back home. The noise is a lullaby, for the train is my mother.

We’re coming to the end of it–I can feel it. The tunnel. Like the fields of northern France emerging from the Chunnel — so much like the fields of New Jersey: dead brown.

Asleep. No one shall awaken for the horror is not ready yet. It needs more time to prepare.

In the white light of London, I find myself again: still human. A man.

This man with no name but I do have a face. And a profession, though I can’t remember what it is right now. I profess things.

Nymph, thine orisons, invisible to me, desacralize my mistakes: thank you for that. It’s only an ordinary dreamscape, with your hat pulled tight over your head, like a depression bum, or a soviet iron worker, sent into the fields again, to wet your feet and sing.