The All-New Bunrab

Water

Rivers are both male and female.
Lakes are female (everything concave...)
Oceans are male; all the great whales and little fishes
Are sperm. Life came to land from the sea.
Ice? Some say the world shall end in ice,
So ice, like war, is male and wears a black robe.
Snow is female:
Gently, gently covers you with a blanket.
Gently, gently, smothers you.
Rain? Ah, rain is puddles, and puddles are children
At just the age where it does not matter; they are
Like the earthworms that share the puddles, both or neither.

Rivers and rain:
Do laundry.
Grind grain.
Grow crops.
Go fishing.
Whether it is Mother Earth or Great Sky Father,
Motherland or Fatherland,
Rivers and rain are mother and father,
However you conceive of those.

It is said: you never step in the same river twice.
Lesson: your mother/father is/are always changing.
It is also true: you never see the same cloud twice.
Lesson: you must constantly renew your reach for the sky.

©2009 R. Kelly Wagner. Permission to reprint granted provided this copyright notice is included.

(There, was that pretentious enough? Now I'm going back to sleep, whatever pretentious dream inspired this.)

ETA, in the light of day: I certainly hit every cliche in the book. I think I meant grandiose dream, though - can dreams even be pretentious? When I'm asleep my grasp of the language may be impaired just a bit. My grasp of cliche, though, not at all!

I can tell it's really spring now: the neighbor's kid set up his portable basketball hoop at the dead end of our street - in front of our house - and he and his friends started bouncing the basketball on the street, earlier than I would have liked to wake up. However, once up: yes! Sunlight! 70 degrees! Our household took its helmets down from the top of the entertainment center, found its gloves on the bookshelf, and rode off into the... traffic. Across the street from the foot of our block is a Sam's Club. Which apparently had something extra going on. It took several minutes to turn from our street onto the other road, and several more to get past the driveway to Sam's, and then a few more to get past the people in the turn lane who suddenly noticed it was a turn lane and then decided they didn't want to turn. And then, just after the right-turn-only lane, a patrol car, lights ablinking, in the traffic lane I needed, guarding several upset looking people on cell phones and a very crumpled car - I have to assume that the other car(s) had already been towed off, as this car could not have achieved the seriously stove-in side it had all by its lonesome. Once past that, finally, it was good. Miles per hour slightly in excess of the posted limit were achieved. Cherry trees in blossom were observed. Also dogwood and magnolia. Also dandelions. Many, many dandelions. Much of the rest of the helmet-owning population of the greater Baltimore area was waved at. Lunch was had. Errands were run. The post office clerks admired the bike, and no one asked why there is a grapevine christmas wreath wrapped around the bottom of my helmet box. And the mail included my order from Upton Tea, including the Spring Dragon Oolong which is my favorite oolong in the world, so now I am going to go make myself a cup of iced tea.

I had a dream the other night, where I had parked the bike on a street, and a van was blocking me from getting out of the parking space. The van owner refused to move the van until I had helped him round up his pygmy goats. Steve woke me up. I had to go back to sleep, to get a few more minutes, so that I could finish rounding up the goats and get the bike back out on the road.

Sunday night, I dreamed that I discovered that, heretofore unrealized by musicologists, all of Dvorak's symphonies were simply copies of Beethoven's, with french horns substituted for all the cello parts. I was doing a note by note comparison of Dvorak's 8th with Beethoven's 5th to prove this, and it was lining up pretty well. Oh, and Dmitri Shostakovich and Leonard Bernstein were actually the same person.

Only a music geek could have that dream.