I walk the big floral to-do out to the trash bin, but the bin's still out on the street.  I have a sack of trash, too, and the vase with all the dead cuts hugged to my chest.  I turn once, decide on the mulch pile for the roses and alstrumeria, penstemon, leather ferns, carnations and tiger lilies, or whatever lilies come freckled cerise on hot-pants pink and a pale shade of white.  It was a big thank you from a writer I did a punctuation edit for and not expected.  They're out there now, all those shriveled stems and limp blooms, wetter for the fogged water left in the vase I poured over them before coming back, brushing my same-color-pale-white-shirt-as-those-lilies shirt front and sleeve, brushing and brushing at the red-brown dust that looks wet but isn't, that looks like some furniture stain splattered from a wild paint brush, willy-nilly, all over me.  I have a strong feeling this dusty stuff will never go away, never fade.  I knew what it was, pretty much in the moment.  The pollen or whatever off those little foot-leg stamen things that protrude out of the big lilies.  Always look like miniature cootie-game leg-foot parts, like the cootie bug got swallowed by the flower but the feet and legs are still there, dangling outside the lips.  And what I know about that punctuation edit I did for a friend and how nice it was to have flowers delivered all the way out here in the middle of nowhere and enjoy them for, say, a week -- is that this pale flannel shirt will always be punctuation now.  I'm pretty certain.  Can't think I'll ever look on it that I won't see semi-colons, commas, periods, exclamation points and what have you -- hyphens? yes, hyphens, too, dangling off my left breast and pausing or flat-out stopping clean from my shoulder right down to my wrist.

They kept washing my glasses in dreams last night.  And I didn't know the hands.  I knew them, but didn't know them, and I think sometimes they may have been mine, but much younger, before I even wore glasses.  But it seems nonsensical to me that the hands were mine; plus they generally were bigger and older, sometimes masculine and sometimes not.  The other dreams last night are lost to me; but the water running from the kitchen tap in a house I haven't lived in for years and the glasses in the red Italian frames held under the running water and then dried and dried in circular motions with a muslin tea towel--this image kept coming back, like coming back to a touchstone from other night places, the ones I can't remember, to the ones I can remember.  And I want to know who belonged to the sets of hands taking care of the smudges on my trifocals.  And I want to know what the dream means beyond someone wanting me to have a clearer view of of the world.  And why, when I close my eyes now and think about it, why did the water shooting out of tap look like it was lit from the inside; as if there could have somehow been a tiny floodlight up inside the chrome plumbing to fill the water with a white glow . . . and why do dreams always leave so many questions?

I am happy you found it, too, Nora.  I had absolutely and completely forgotten about it.  I think I must copy it now and repost it on my blog [lynndoiron.wordpress.com] in my journaling section there.  Thanks.

“A mountain cannot have two tigers” – I read that today on a blog belonging to a Dr. Hsu; it was an article title.  The article was about two appointments in Malaysia filling posts for women by women.  But my interest is in the title: A mountain cannot have two tigers.  I would argue that a mountain can have two tigers: one that prowls the upper trails and one who maintains the lower elevations.  I would argue that a fence be built around the circumference of the mountain about one-third of the way up and that some tricky gates be included in the fencing so that other animals on the mountain, but not the tigers, could easily pass back and forth by some code known just to them, but not the tigers.  I would further argue that in a little time the lower tiger would leave the mountain in search of whole mountains wherein he/she could reside and roam at will; and that the upper tiger would, in time, die of old age with no progeny, having spent his/her life fenced off from others of his stripe.  But, to say “A mountain cannot have two tigers” is, I would argue, absurd.

The upper tiger would be pretty damn cold as well as thin, depending on the size of the mountain.  I'd be lower tiger if I had a choice.

Tip for removing lily pollen from clothes...stick some sellotape (scotch tape?) over the mark...it will lift away!