Tendencies of a sleeping salamander.
Salamanders in my dreams, always, in my dreams.
I have been mountainously wandering and walking around thinking about nothing but salamanders. their blind grey eyes and pinkish bodies, sightlessly scuttling into the mouth it spent its larval stages in. blue covers itself in eyelids of glittery dim. I think I’ve misplaced my eyes too. this month it’s been nothing but light and caves and this single lungless night I can't stop walking into.
Salamandrella
keyserlingii
is
a bluish salamander
that inhabits wet woods
& in winter, freezes
& by freezing, sleeps
& by sleeping, dreams
& by dreaming,
(faint)
[illegible]
They mate in dark puddles.
When the sky cracks open.
They scuttle away into.
Rotting tree roots.
Pillows of moss.
The lips of dim ponds.
Sleep approaches them.
Rattling death in a cup.
Sleep slows them.
Sleep licks them.
Dimness.
Fingers blacken.
Limbs turn to
white ash-twigs.
Falling. Purple
crushes you.
“If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.”
- René Magritte
There is something about salamanders and their little knots of dreams strewn twitching about a disc of ice. petals of their poison breath floating by. the way a dream lugs you into restlessness. the way a dream can turn your brain into an apple core lugged with teethmarks. the way a dream is a white net, its dew cannibalises you.
From Wikipedia:
The salamander is found throughout French folklore, although in differing form. In addition or sometimes instead of its fire symbolism, it was attributed a powerful poison. Some legends say that merely by falling into a well, it would poison the water, and by climbing a fruit tree, poison the fruit. Its highly toxic breath was reportedly enough to swell a person until their skin broke; in Auvergne, it supposedly did the same to herds of cattle. This gained it the name of "bellows breath".
Like the real animal, the legendary folkloric salamander breathed seldom; unlike the real salamander, the only way to kill one was said to be to lock it in a confined space so that it breathed its own poison. death by creation. the Bretons feared it, not daring to utter its real name in fear that it would hear, and then kill them.
I think my own notion of love is precisely like this. It cannot be over done. like breathing in your name, like saying hashem's name: yh-wh. who will breathe for me when I cannot? I want a shadow unhaunted by dread. a place less effaced by all this heaving, or an earth, untouched and heaven fulfilled. this is my faint embered dream. I am, merely a bleak spleen grasping blindly for light, for some transformation. exactly like these dusk-drenched urodeles. pale, blind and grasping, numbly swimming and scuttling through tenebrous darkness, trying to find light, trying to find sight, perhaps even one breath.
The eggs of these creatures have to travel halfway up their abdomen, loose in their belly, to get from the ovary to the oviduct. a journey of impatience? narrow and long, dragging vagueness and nascent lack. or a journey of gallant lust? impending the eternal bite of mockery and thorny grime. I dreamt I was dissecting one of these mud puppies. I know, my dreams are nice. I was flaying back pieces of skin, offering slivers like organs like facts about how salamanders mix their oxygen-rich blood with their oxygen-poor blood and it’s inefficient but its alright because they can breathe through their skin.
My eft keeps taking them gently and smiling and is slowly sewing them together like something worth cherishing and it should hurt but it doesn't? It’s never been so easy to peel back a tangle of veins and give them away. insanity! he's interlocking our bones with every word and every touch and I want it but I'm terrified. the ribs on a salamander don't surround anything, but if this doesn't work its going to take breaking all of mine to remove him from where he's grafted himself into my chest!
Salamanders lose most of their gills when they move onto land. they don't ever get them back. do they realise as it happens how much is changing? It’s not that I want to stay in the water, but what if once I leave its too late to come back? the call of void equally opposed by fear of the unknown.
I don't know why I like salamanders so much. they're dusk creatures. soaked creatures. in sleep, in time, in dreams, in light, darkness, seeing, not seeing, water, air, breathing, not breathing, pinkish. scuttling in the lacunae between all these things. such a little life.
It's endearing, somehow, gratifying, but I keep anticipating my scalpel to hit rotten flesh - is this pessimism or prophesy? listen to your gut, but mine only trembles - is it warning or anticipation? I don't know what I'm doing nor writing precisely, just peeling back muscle and viscera to say here is my heart, fragile as a liver.
Autumn is a hard bowl.
I learn to live with it.
Then I forget how
to live without it.
In the end,
salamanders that
choose to bed nearest
ponds awaken.
They blink, shudder, dive.
The water shuts over them, a cold eyelid.
They scuttle into their teaspoon of summer.
Carrying a dream
in each eye.
Those who slept furthest away,
caught in sudden, bitter frosts
that their physiological antifreeze
cannot smother -
Salamanders are dream sieves.
They die tangled in little lusts,
moons, morsels, thorns, wetness.
Blue bodies dot the frozen soil.
You know I tried to write these dreams down
but they sadden me.
I conserve syllables, I conserve breath.
The notebook grows heavier & heavier.
The adagio reaches its end.