I dream about the book for twelve days.
Every night a million people are
talking, but none of them understand
one another. They are talking hurriedly,
like they are just remembering something they
used to be afraid of and they must speak
before it begins haunting them again.
The woman who gave me the book is
among them. She is naked from the waist
down. She keeps telling me that
I should do only what I want to do.

But waking up is my first responsibility.
I must read the next few pages to see
how I can finally accept wisdom. I will need
it now more than ever since I have had
my vasectomy. These are the days of
sluggishness, of no belief in anything—
no mistakes, no judgments, no nagging feelings
of guilt. There would be a simple peace
if only I could get my wife to agree with
my new but determined hopelessness.

Now she is reading this same book too,
but she won’t tell me what she’s dreaming.
I must try to read her mind over
Sunday morning coffee. She is good at
this game and easily outwits me.
She thinks of nothing, but it is a different
nothing than the one I am committed to.
She seems vapid and contented, so much so
that I am jealous, and I imagine us lying
together, mute in the silence under one
large blanket. We appear lifeless,
like we have somehow learned to inhabit
the pristine wisdom of a cadaver.
The air instinctively gathers us in its coils,
and we feel along its smooth muscles, its
racing pulse until we touch the soft ground,
ecstatic, ready to cross over into
the empty realm of each other’s dream.