Dreams That You Weren't In

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I dreamt last night that I fell asleep for three years. The first thing I saw when I woke up was J-Lo, looking much worse for the wear; many wrinkles and come-back movies. What does this mean?

On ER last night, Abby half-quoted one of my favorite e.e. cummings poems. "I Carry Your Heart with Me." Here it is, in it's entirety:

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without (anywhere
i go you go, i go, my dear; and whatever is done
by my only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for you beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart.

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)

While doing laundry today, that Elizabeth Bishop poem kept echoing in my head: "The Art of Losing Isn't Hard to Master..." All I could really remember by heart was "practice losing farther, losing faster." I have been practising losing, or at least, practicing not being attached to the things I think I have. The message, I guess, is that you should lose something every day, maybe just so that you understand that things aren't important; that you will always be losing something whether you recognize it or not. Your youth, your memories, your house.

I give you, "One Art:"

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones.
And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.---

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love)
I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

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