the romance of the dream

of course it's romantic and of course i love it. me in a quiet and warm cabin in some New England woods. the smell of cedar embracing me. strong and able coffee at my left, a warm and giving apple turn-over at my right and in the center my faithful computer accepting my daily beatings of doggerel prose. and i will make helicopter wind patterns on the surface of my coffee and recall the time we traveled along Mauna Kea to get to the instep of Mauna Loa. how small and slight and weightless and insignificant i felt then. i'll remember holding onto to my backpack the only thing i could hold onto, i hadn't made friends yet. i was staring out across the upper backs of great mountains. my eyes stung and i cried from the sheer velocity of my new sight.

my cat would come and rub against my legs making all seem poetic and simple yet profound for the light that slants through my thick glassed windows is coming from the East and it illuminates house plants panting for summer though winter has only begun. and the light wakes my sleepy fingers and i put a thumb to my bottom lip and for a moment lament that i have no lover. but who has the time? there is so much writing to be done. and my mind rushes to a new thought, a little game of Red Rover, Red Rover that i play.

the coffee is black as it ought to be and imported from my island home. there are some things i like to keep from home. kona coffee is one of them. i drink from a ceramic mug, very beautiful, charcoal black save for the splashes of metallic color like ocean waves gone silver and god-like, heaven's splashing, the stuff of roman catholic murals. this cup i got from you not long ago. you lived here too. and you made pottery. you were beautiful and devoted. somehow, i woke one morning and all i had was the coffee cup. i've started to wonder if i imagined you.

there is such silence in my little cabin home. the birds are light influences and the wind exhales every now and again to assure me that the world is still revolving and i'm still rotating in my human shell.

i am writer. solitude invites me. perhaps i'll go to town today, pick up some things for dinner. more likely i'll stay in. watch how the light fluctuates throughout my cabin. go for a walk. pet the cat. rub the coffee cup like a magic lamp and wish for you back.

all my students are on semester break. i was supposed to have finished grading their exams but i've spent the past week writing. who could blame me? that's what i do. but the university is not sympathetic. of course it's all so romantic isn't it? some passionate and tortured soul snuggled into a quiet corner trying to escape a maddening world, touching young lives during the day and supposedly writing the next great american novel by night. but romance isn't reality is it?

i'm sitting at the kitchen table in a well lit and open house located on the big island of hawaii. the neighbor is fixing motorcycles, a constant revving of coughing engines beating against my ears. dogs bark wildly at a tumbling leaf. there is no cat at my leg and no smell of cedar to embrace me. i drink black coffee from a white ceramic mug with a picture of a cat on it. you never existed. i work for an invasive plants control team a fancy way of saying i spray herbicide for a living. this is the reality.

yet i dream of that little place in the woods. dream of total and complete silence when i want it. dream of writing, writing, writing like making love all the time, all the time it's wonderful, all the time it's great, all the time i want to. to write, to write. this is what i imagine when i think of my future, this is the scene i paint. yes, it's romantic but aren't dreams supposed to be?