I suppose they're the trash of thought —
dreams. The mind's midden ... Like
Poindexters, we " process a lot
of material " ; the residue
has to go somewhere. Our oldest
waste-problem, is it not? —
Stuff unbecoming or im-
politic or un-
bearable to remember. Stuff
we thought we were rid of but
here it is still in the dig
of deep sleep. Sometimes
not so deep, either. Sometimes
not asleep, even: the dream
thrusting up into sunlight — one
corner, at least, like an iceberg's,
or a tusk from a tar-pit,
or a damning memorandum. . . .

I helped a friend clean out a barn
a while back: Surprise for his wife
who was off visiting ... So would I
be off visiting if I lived
neighbor to that barn. A vom-
itorium it was, a charnel house,
a gigantic tumor, a hidden reef
whole decades had split on and foundered
and written the wrecks of their histories
in rot, rust, dung, dead chickens, rats,
rags, maggots, mildew and spilth from dirt floor
to roof joists and from hay-mow
to rafters. For five days Alan and I
dug there, damp cloths to our faces —
and still coughing — and five times
trucked six-and-a-half-ton loads
to the town dump.

" Our Mary
is one of those savers , " he explained.
" Wouldn't throw away half a shoe
if the pig had eaten the other half. . . . But,
as you see, it got away from us. " (I
sneezed and agreed.) " It's a paradox, "

he went on, in a series of parentheses
between coughs. " In everything else,
neat as a nuthatch. . . . I've mentioned
The barn a few times — as who wouldn't —
and she says, " Oh, I'll get to that.
please! Leave it. Just leave it.
I know what I want to do down there."

So I took to avoiding the place —
systematically, more or less —
and literally for years. . . . And now this!
Critical mass! Flash-point! Ground-zero!. . . . "

So we coughed and we dug and we dragged
and we shovelled and felt ashamed
at the waste-wake we leave in the world
and never look back at, till some
stoppage occurs and the stuff
mucks up halfway to the moon
and we see we could drown in it — in-
deed are half drowned already. . . .

Five hundred old plastic half-gallon
empties the color of phlegm ... Christ, yes!
To the Dump! (But what then,
when the dump's full? When a thousand
scowloads of filth wallow the coastlines
forever, forbidden to dump or dock —
a sea-full of Flying Drekmen! )

Some weeks later we met,
and I asked about Mary. His face fell.
" She broke down and cried, " was his answer.
" Accused me of treachery,
of going behind her back. Now
she's talking divorce. . . . "

(What was this?
I thought I knew Mary, knew her
as all did: a gracious, radiant,
competent, kindly soul; the sort
young and old take their troubles to.)
" God, Alan, d'you think she's all right? "
I broke in. " That doesn't make sense! "
" It does in a way, " he mumbled.
" When you know the whole story. "

And then he told it. Since when
I have thought much about dreams,
how they reach down, down
into whatever we've been,
and believed utterly buried

or burned or shredded. . . .
" Years back, "
Alan said, " I went over the fence.
Got obsessed with another woman.
Mary knew, but she never reproached me.
She simply went on being Mary.
You know her. Chickadees on her shoulders ...
That gentle luminousness
that seems more than half magic,
considering the world we're in. . . . "
(There was a break then,
Till he got his voice back.)
" But that, though I didn't mark it,
was where it began — the saving .
I see it now: From then on,
she couldn't let anything go — rags,
cans, cartons. . . . One part, I think,
was just having lost so much,
by her lights, already: Marriage.
What marriage meant; what it could
and should be. — I'd seen to that. —
But another part, and the part
nobody, not even Mary,
saw, until now, was rage:
a rage so relentless, consuming,
you or I'd have gone mad with it. . . .
But if Mary did, well,
she'd her own way to deal with it:
Simply, put madness aside —
in the barn there — let it grow
bottle by bottle, wad by wad, into a hell
of rottenness and reproach. . . . I'm afraid
what we hauled that week to the dump
was the thirty-some tons of ballast
Mary needed to go on being Mary,
go on as though all were well
and the marriage hadn't been trashed —
as she saw it — as I guess it had been. . . .

The absolute horror, I mean,
of that barn was for me to live with
if I lived with her. My penance.

And now it's gone. "

What could I say? What will I say
next time we meet — if we do meet;
if he isn't gone, too, by this time? —
That he makes himself too important;
something else might lie underneath
that awful tumulus of trash
and demoralization? A woman
might shrewdly suppose such. But
what I think of now is the Admiral
(we'd had the Joint Hearings on
the whole time) and the hero's welcome
they gave him back home — no matter
the stake they had in that trash
he got rid of. But They never knew ,
of course. Never even dreamed.