I was on a bus, some version of a Bread-Loaf-last-night in which a party was being held. Yes, it was a party bus. We were lining up to read a poem a piece, but I had left my paper elsewhere. “I know the poem,” I thought and made my way to the front. I begin reciting, accurately, my poem “Elegy with a Rope in It,” lingering on each line while the next was recalled from an unpracticed deep memory. But toward the end, the last four lines, I became subtly aware of the dream—only realizing this minutes later when I really woke—and I composed, in the dream, four lines which felt, in the dream, like four good lines. The only one I remember was the last: “I live to wait for this waiting.”

I suppose it’s been done before: Coleridge claimed that Kubla Khan—one of my favorite Romantic poems—was written in a dream, though he was deep in an opium stupor. The only gauze in my head came in through the window in the form of the Port Townsend winds.