# [D5:9M] Vision: [[Future Child Portraits]] Hexagram: [[Fifth Dream (D5) in Nine Movements (9M)]] Trials: [[Fifth Trial]] Symbols: #cigarette #floor #prayer #bodyadrift #child #rage #bed #ghost #EarthPlanet #fire #darkwindow #panther #daughter #abandonchurch #flies #four #fish #alien #legs #head #hands #eye October 18th, 2034 I. We light candles for each we’ve lost and place them around the sacristy where we sleep.  The rainwater drips off the roof outside.  With our last two cigarettes we light them and soon we try to sleep.  I think: I’ll need to go to the newsstand in the morning for more, then remember it’s closed, long closed, like everything else.   How the outer routines command the inner, even after the former have ceased.  Never, it seems, does my accounting take place in time, but behind it.  Time behind time behind time. The candlelight pulses faintly up the stone wall. How I can light a candle but cannot pray. How in dreams now, almost nightly, I see, as from above, myself on my knees and my forehead pressed against my knuckles digging into the floor.  And how a sound of something like mice runs along beneath the floorboards as I mumble what sounds like nothing at all. Yet when I wake, I know the prayer and write it down in spite of myself. II. Dear Body Adrift in Space, Just once, give us a child who survives.  One without birth defects.  Speckle-eyed.  Heart-holed.  Weird calcified little penis.  Give us the round-faced instead of the square.  Or, if it doesn’t suffer, let the child have all of it.  A child still here in the morning.  That’s what we pray for.   We pray knowing it makes no difference. We pray to make space for this terrible rage, to make it a bed.  The rage of loss, of purposelessness.  Orphan rage. Not mine but yours, here on the planet long before I came around, a rage always just passing through.  Not abberant but fundamental to the world you yourself made. The ghost of your own life.  In the push and pull of the Earth Planet, rage is every unaccounted contraction, ignored by its every expansion.  Dried tree rage.  Forest fire rage.   I won’t apologize for a thing which isn’t mine, but I’ll hold onto it for you just the same, just as one would an orphan. And when one day, you come to call, I’ll say to you, no, it’s mine now. I will raise it to know itself. You who do not know how to love. Æmen. III. Outside the dark window I think I see something like a panther slink by.  A bobcat I could believe, but a panther?  It stops with one paw raised and seems to stare at the ground.  Then it moves out into the dark, and is gone. Grant us a son or daughter without fur or scales or feathers.  Awake and aloud I pray this and my voice humiliates me. IV. In the dream, I am on a late-night talk show with two co-hosts, a man and a woman.  The set is futuristic, like the interior of a space station. He says, “Yes, a force for life that extends beyond this human life to the life of organic-inorganic ecologies or operations.  A different way of conceiving a life.” She says, “Generating different manners of living, an end in itself.” She smiles at me. “Æmen, why don’t you lead us in prayer?” Thrilled to be asked, I begin, “Dear Body Adrift, give us a child made for the world which is yet to come.”  I look at them and say, “all in agreement?” I wake and write it down. V. We wake in the scant light of early morning.  We’ve taken to sleeping in the sacristy of the abandoned church because it’s the smallest room, the most domestic.  The windows are ordinary and yet to be broken.  That seemed a miracle in itself at first. The world is silent now, save the cooing and chattering of doves and finches.   I used to quiz my daughter: “What color is a purple finch?” She’d shout and spin once in a circle: “Red!”  Her voice was small and silver as fish. VI. We used to feed the birds in our yard. We’d start with a ten-pound bag of feed and, because it was too heavy for her, she’d insist on having one hand on it while we poured.  She would insist on twisting the top, the feeder’s roof, back into place and would cry if I did too much to help. Most of the windows in the church are broken allowing in flies and mosquitos in the summer and the cold in the winter.  Plastic doesn’t last long in the high winds and storms and wood planks make it too dark. In the remaining windows, I will occasionally glimpse her four-year-old face. She would sometimes draw on herself and I might see her with something like a smudge or doodle on her forehead.  “Pretend I’m a unicorn,” she might have said, so that I can see the smudge as a horn.   It’s not that I think it’s real what I see, just that the mind which is played tricks upon is not my own.  Neither mind nor tricks. Dear Body, where have you gone with my mind? VII. In the dream, my grandma is watching television on mute in her room at the dementia care facility.  Bloated old men noiselessly rant and rave at her from inside it.  She’s carried on her habit of watching the news in the middle of the afternoon. I leave her room and go into the communal kitchen to see what I can find her for lunch.  The refrigerator is crammed full of whole fish, and I close it quickly because of the stench. From the kitchen phone, I call her room.  A voice answers, hers, but I can’t understand what she’s said.  She seems to be speaking an unfamiliar language. “Grandma,” I say into the receiver, “it’s me, Æmen.” Her voice says, “Your telepathy has been removed from your DNA so that all of your kind can be bred without it.” VIII. Years ago, two nights before grandma died, I slept on the floor in her room at the facility.  She was in her bed, wired up to machines, and, from time to time, crying out in pain so that I had to call in nurses for medication. But once that night, she woke just audibly enough for me to hear her blankets shift.  She sat straight up in bed, eyes still closed, and began mumbling.  Though it was painful for her to do so, she turned toward me and somehow swung her brittle legs over the edge of the bed and let them dangle.  The pain subsided and she opened her eyes.  She looked deliberately into mine as I scooted near her.  With a faint smile, she reached her hand out toward me and gently touched my forehead with the soft tip of a finger. “What are you?” I asked. “A unicorn,” she said. “Read your book.” A book was open in my hands.  It was this book.  These were the words writ down. I cannot recall waking.  I fear my life is a form of sleep, that what I write is just another dream, and that there is no reader to wake me. IX. Eight or nine of us lounge around the plush social quarter of the space station.  I have an Old-Fashioned in my hands. Everyone else is a space alien with glowing eyes and drinks from glowing mugs. I vent to the group, the nine of them, about how tedious the past few days have been cleaning out all the contaminated test tubes.  They hold up their mugs and salute me.  Hard work that, they seem to say.  No joke. “I love you guys,” I tell them. “We love you,” they would say if they could. “Telepathy,” I explain, “leads either to enslavement or culling.” One of them is probably saying, “getting rid of it is the only way we’ll survive this.” “Just don’t take it from us,” might say another. Together we laugh and seem to laugh and drink the night away.