Buttercup Dream, and You:
A story about love lost.
keith harmon snow
♥ Last night I dreamt of you.
You lived on a broken farm with weed gardens and wild
flowers. There were long blue hills and box canyons behind the farm. A desert
was in front, sparse and dry, flaming red with shrubs and yellow with islands
of buttercups.
When I arrived you were walking down from the hills,
shuffling through the flowery desert. You walked like an old, tired man,
shuffling along, stopping to pick flowers or to look up into the sky. Your
clothes were baggy and torn and gray. You were far away but I could see it was
you and when the sun caught your eyes they flashed like quasars.
I walked out to meet you in the silence of the desert.
You looked up and I was there. You were much older than I imagined you to be
and as I saw this I sank inside my self, leaving my white shell exposed to the
hot sun and the penetrating glare of your quasar eyes. I gasped and the shriek
that came from my heart was stolen in its genesis, before it passed over my
lips, taken from me by a hawk that circled high overhead, and cried out by the
hawk as it soared over the fiery desert. Like a gale pulling tumbleweeds behind
it, my scream blew into the box canyons and was amplified between those walls
of dust and stone until it shook the earth, until the canyons began to crumble,
until it collapsed into itself in a burst of black anger.
And then it was you and I alone in the empty desert,
standing in silence, looking down, burying our toes in the hot sand.
When the hawk whirled down and landed on your shoulder
it spoke to me and as it did I fell into a deep sleep. I dreamt that the hawk
was your spirit set free and that your body wandered the desert in perpetual
decay -- the last shards of you evaporating in the desert sun, your skin
withering like discarded flowers. And when the steely talons of the hawk tore
into your shoulder I saw that it was flesh and when the hawk lifted you with
its iron wings outstretched and laughter in its eyes and began to carry you
away I woke up.
It was a dream within a dream.
The hawk was gone.
In my dream you smiled and you gave me the blue roses
you were holding and then I knew that the blue hills far away were hills of
blue roses. But the roses melted in my hands and dripped onto the desert sand,
the drips becoming tiny silver crosses as they struck the earth. You watched
sadly as they melted, your eyes following the blue drips downward, following
them over my hands and downward, pulling the corners of your mouth down with
them, pulling tears out of the corners of your eyes.
After the roses melted into crosses you turned and you
shuffled away. In my dream I called to you and you stopped and when you turned
you were young again and you took me and we made love, there, on an island of
yellow buttercups.
When you took me I cried.
We made love as the sun melted into the hills of blue
roses, and we made love as the moon rained its golden haze over the desert
night and the owls called to one another about the mice in the dunes, and we
made love as the moon fell from the sky and the wild creatures wandered out of
the darkness and circled around us -- their eyes shimmering with the hunger of
their innocence, their teeth flashing like silver daggers, the chorus of their
wild songs humming to the irregular rhythm of their collective hearts -- and we
made love until the creatures danced and laughed with the morning dew and ran
off into the desert as the sun rose above the farm and burned our naked bodies.
We said nothing.
In between making love and making love again you slept
between my legs with your ear to my belly, while I dreamt of forever, there,
you and I, floating on the islands of yellow buttercups.
In my dream the hawk returned in the night. I watched
it soar above us, capturing falling stars like prey, diving and hooking them in
its talons the moment they would have burned themselves out, feeding on them
from the bloated limbs of thorny cactus with pride in its egg-shell eyes -- the
captured stars spraying sparks of blue light which drifted over the dunes and,
like fireflies, disappeared. But one star escaped and the hawk -- diving in
pursuit but missing its quarry -- turned suddenly and plunged earthward and
entered deep inside me, taking my breath away and pulsing my heart wildly.
When you awoke you lifted your head off my belly and
crawled up to kiss me. You kissed me with long, soft, slow kisses, your lips
fresh and cool, your quasar eyes burning into mine. You kissed along my neck
and over my breasts. You held me with your eyes. You kissed down my belly and
between my thighs. After we made love again you smeared my thighs with the
velvet nectar of yellow buttercups, picking them one-by-one, each time
whispering a prayer to free the tiny spirits possessed within them.
The spirits were like splinters of glass and they fled
like whispers.
You teased me then, smearing those smooth petals into
my naked thighs, my head falling back, my shoulders pinned to the ground by the
silent pleasure in my heart, my eyes closing. And then we made love again.
In the shadows cast by the cactus standing rigid and
aloof, the moonbeams lingered like rejected lovers.
As I watched the moonbeams were changed into souls.
From the shadows they emerged, souls walking with black hats and stiff canes,
and souls bent with solitude shuffling carelessly and hopelessly along, and
souls tight with fear and anguish. In the river of passing souls I whispered
your name, too soft to be heard, but in the melancholy dew of the midnight moon,
in a silent tryst, you took my hand in yours and you lifted me gently. We held
hands and looked into each other's lives.
You tasted the wind then, searching with your quasar
eyes, until the hawk descended from the sky, like an angel lowered on a string,
wings lifted behind it, and landed on your shoulder. You whispered to the hawk
and it lifted and in a streak of orange flame it burned over the desert to the
hills of blue roses and circled high above them until the ground began to shake
and a black stallion running like death before a harem of white mares spilled
out of the blue hills and raced wildly before the wind.
The hawk flew over them.
As fierce as my desire for you the horses circled us,
bucking and kicking all around us, consuming us in their violent frenzy, and
from a cloud of red dust and desert sand the black stallion reared and loomed
over me, a black cyclone of hooves and teeth and nostrils.
And then the stallion's wild and unyielding eyes
crossed with yours. Cowed and solemn, it knelt before me. You took my hand and
together we rode, the stallion taking us away, the white mares filling the
desert behind us, the many wild creatures running out of the desert to again
bear witness. Behind me, with your arms around me, with the reins in my hands
and your naked body pressed to mine, you whispered eternal love in my ear, the
strands of my hair ringing like chimes as your words passed over them.
Your words raced to my heart as the stallion raced
blindly into a desert of buttercup bliss.
And then, in my dream, I awoke.
In my dream you slept between my legs, your ear to my
body, your name etched in the yellow nectar of my buttercup things, etched in a
tiny heart, your name and mine, Cupid's arrow shot through, an "I love
you."
On our tiny island of buttercups I dozed in a sea of
ecstasy.
But when the shadows crawled out of their thorny beds
of cactus, when my thighs glowed crimson red with sunbeams and yellow with the
smear of pulverized buttercups, the hawk came again and took you in its talons.
You hovered over me then, tears of blue roses trickling over your cheeks,
dripping from your chin, tears of tiny blue roses falling over me as I lay
beneath you.
And then the hawk took you away.
In my dream I tried to follow you but I could not. I
struggled to arise but was pinned to the earth by the sadness that filled my
heart like lead. I screamed as you drifted away, my screams turning to sobs, to
whispers, to empty echoes drown by the silence of the fiery desert.
But it was only a dream, within a dream, and when I
awoke, in my dream, I awoke.
I could remember nothing.
It seemed I had been somewhere with someone I knew,
but I could remember nothing.
I lay shivering under the scratchy wool blankets in my
empty bed in a cold dark room with floors of creaking wood and the trickle of
mice in the ceiling and when I thought of buttercups I did not know why.
I arose and in the light of the empty hall I saw a
picture of you taken when we were lovers. The tears that filled my heart burst
forth like a scream as I stumbled back and buried my body beneath the covers in
my empty bed. It was, I knew then, the desert in my dream.