A selection from Michael Ruby’s books recording his dreams in poetry and prose. Cover art: photo of main building and graffiti from American canyon Ruins.
NEAPOLITAN NIGHTS
(based on dreams in Napoli in late March 1980)
On the main street of my hometown, I had a lifeless talk
with the arrogant older sister of my lifelong friend.
My friend stood nearby. I felt guilty I hadn’t answered her letter yet.
She wandered off. I caught up with her on a shady side street.
She told me all about her time in Vermont,
where she had to entertain these two drips from high school.
She opened a box from them, a house present.
It was my dead brother’s beautiful buckskin pants.
“Oh no,” she exclaimed, embarrassed by such a lavish gift from people she doesn’t like.
I saw the chief groupie of our college cult leader
coming toward me on a shady street near my childhood home.
I tried to avoid him, but he hailed me.
Overhead, each cloud looked like a bright tessera in a mosaic.
“I think you were trying to avoid me.”
I denied it, made some bullshit excuse involving parallax.
At a huge cafe, I paused in front of the price list,
worried the groupie didn’t have enough money and I’d get stuck with the bill.
I noticed a dish of vanilla ice cream and a coffee perched on a ledge.
I ate the ice cream and walked across the room with the coffee.
Worried the ice cream belonged to someone,
I walked back, avoiding several waiters.
A little boy was looking for something. He started crying.
I fled outside to a shady park where people blew around in a warm wind.
My best friend from college smiled as usual.
Two rich kids—one from summer camp, one from the country club—were together
inexplicably.
In Conversazione class, we discussed Stendhal.
Stendhal himself was there, but dressed as an 18th century general.
He took me to watch him hit golf balls in a worrisomely small park.
Professoressa called on me out of the blue.
I went blank, then attacked both Carter and Reagan.
I made my college best friend hours late for Versification class.
He and I stopped by the house of another college friend.
They took huge bowls of lentil soup for themselves,
leaving none for me. I was jealous of their closeness.
At the end of a soccer game, I came in to take a corner kick
out of the mouth of one of my English friends in Perugia.
I inspected his teeth carefully afterward.
They looked fine. But later, I noticed a big front tooth was missing.
He peeled away the other front tooth, like a decal,
revealing yet another tooth behind it,
with a black grid etched on, like an old waffle iron.
My little sister was limping from a knee injury.
We had a big party at our childhood home.
Everyone was watching football.
Upstairs, my sexy high-school girlfriend
discovered someone having a heart attack,
but it wasn’t my father, the man was younger than my father.
Our family was driving along a country road during a terrific storm.
Two tornadoes mingled in the distance!
Near the country club, we parked by a stream on private property.
An armed guard came by. I’d had run-ins with him before.
He bragged about how he’d shot a boy.
I called him a scum and ran inside a cabin, but I couldn’t bolt the door.
He pushed his hand through and aimed right at my face.
I couldn’t believe he was going to kill me for saying something.
Somehow, Mom saved me.
After my mountain climb, some kids invited me to shoot marbles,
even though I’d rarely played as a kid.
“I wonder if kids today prefer clear or smoky marbles.
I guess it’s always changing, though I prefer smoky.”
I wanted to get my climbing gear, but was afraid of the guard from the last dream.
My “fidanzata” and I were walking on a crowded Italian street.
Everyone was a head taller than us.
I spotted my lanky college tutor, who flipped out after my sophomore year.
We didn’t acknowledge each other.
Everyone went to a bar for beers.
I only had a 10,000 lire note, and worried I’d have to pay more than my share.
Was there an inconspicuous way to change it?
Not to worry, my fidanzata had smaller bills.
On my last day at home before going away for a year,
I drove around and did errands with my dead brother.
We packed together in the evening, like when he went to Europe.
I missed my plane, but it wasn’t important,
there was another flight two hours later.
In a room with Mom and Grandma,
thinking I might never see Grandma again,
I debated whether I should say goodbye to her for good.
The two of them were looking through a photo album.
I asked for a picture of Grandma, which was fine.
I noticed a very odd collection of pictures of myself,
including one with my brother-in-law at a banquet in my honor.
At that moment, a thought crossed my mind:
“My dead brother’s the only one who can help me where I’m going.”
Needless to say, I strongly rebelled at the thought.
The morning of Thursday, June 28, 2001
I went to visit my long-dead cousin Fan Hoffman in the hospital. Fan’s room, W, had been vacated, and she had left a note for me that was signed “Your (now dead) cousin Fan.” The staff said she hadn’t died, but had been shifted to another floor, to room W there. That floor seemed a hundred times larger, like an airport terminal, with streams of people flowing through. It would take me forever to find W. This was turning out to be a wild goose chase. I decided to give up. Meanwhile, on screens distributed around the immense space, there were several big sporting events going on simultaneously. I saw one of the New Jersey Nets make a fantastic shot at the end of a playoff game. Russian athletes flooded into the area where I was, jostling me. Later, I saw our family friend Susan Ei, who had also received a card from Fan. I didn’t realize she was in touch with Fan. I also saw my friend Mark Woldin. On the subway, on the seat next to mine, there was a partly handwritten physics text. Was that my writing? The last pages were missing, torn out, as if the owner had finished studying everything but that.
The morning of Sunday, August 26, 2001
One day, I had nothing to do and decided to bicycle to Princeton. At the library, I didn’t have a bike lock, so I carried my bike up to the second floor and stowed it there. “That’s no way to treat such a bike,” said a girl who later told me she was planning a Rhine trip starting in Hamburg. Afterward, I read old newspapers. I couldn’t find anything about Austrian novelist Robert Musil. I saved for last the front page about a New York cholera epidemic.
The morning of Friday, August 15, 2003
I murdered a repellent, heavy older man in this odd shack in the middle of a campus and was trying to figure out how to dispose of his body. Maybe somewhere in the woods near our house in upstate New York. My Wall Street Journal friend Bart Fraust was gonna help me, but then he backed out. I was slightly afraid he was going to say something to someone. In the shack, I realized I couldn’t drag the guy anywhere. What about burying him in the shack? It might smell. But no one ever went in there. Later, I noticed all this yellow rope jerry-rigged around the outside of the shack and some police around. I wasn’t worried about them, even though I had been worrying earlier about getting caught. Murdering the jerk hadn’t been worth it.
The morning of Wednesday, November 5, 2003
In the middle of a suburban town, I saw the daughter of Dr. Stanley Goodman, the obstetrician who delivered me at Orange Memorial Hospital on the night of September 19, 1957. I remembered we owed her family money for services rendered long ago, and I was paying back long-forgotten debts. I suggested to her that it might be to the tune of $10,000, which I regretted saying shortly thereafter. While she was calculating the figure, I looked at one of her business cards. A psychologist, she had a practice out in Pennsylvania that was linked to several other businesses, including a funeral home. I mentioned my mother, whom she had seen, and she suggested that Mom has Alzheimer’s. I disagreed. She handed me the bill, which had five or six separate figures that added up to $7,000 or so. Her bald father, the obstetrician friend of Dad who delivered me, was standing with her. Why had I initiated this unnecessary payment?
The morning of Sunday, August 14, 2005
At a bar, engaged in a literary discussion with two women, I defended the poet’s continued involvement with the whole tradition, stretching back to Virgil and Homer. “You must not be very happy with what you see around you,” one quipped. I started reading a very good post-modern story in one of the women’s copy of a tabloid magazine. She had to go before I finished. I went looking for another copy. My Journal friend Josh Rosenbaum walked past. I went outside with him and my friend Sandy Stillman to sit at a table and listen to the poetry reading through outside loudspeakers. A fine rain began. I started back inside for something. Three celebrities, well-dressed and buffed, thrust by me. One looked like Bill Beutel and another like Willie Mays. I walked through the bar into the big bookstore in back. One of the celebrities vomited all over the floor of the bar. They were sweeping it up with sawdust. I noticed two packs of cigarettes sitting in a wicker basket. I pulled one cigarette, then a second cigarette, from the open pack. A hawkeyed waitress observed me. I fitted the second one back into the pack, thanking the woman. Outside, Sandy wanted to leave. He pointed to a silver gray limo waiting across the street and offered me a ride home.
The morning of Saturday, September 22, 2007
Walking through narrow streets into the center of an Italian town in search of coffee, I cut through a little hotel, where people were still sleeping, mostly college students. I paused to look at the hotel expresso machine in a hall alcove. At a bar in town, a red-headed guy walked up to me. “What are you doing here?” he asked. He was from my hometown of South Orange, a tennis player, a year older than I am. His face and balding red head were so vivid, but I didn’t know who he was. He knew me so well that I pretended to know him. Later, I was walking with my Journal friend Peter Saenger. We were carrying a boat along an arid country road in Sicily, looking for a place to put it back in the lake or river. To our left, we noticed a small fenced-in shrine with a hole behind it in the dirt hillside. I asked a tough guy, who was fiddling around his small front yard nearby, if we could explore the hole in the hillside. He nodded. We entered the hole, which immediately opened out into this huge cathedral. One room had a long indoor reflecting pool like the Mall in Washington. Another had an indoor field. Some tourists were milling around. A child-sized man came up to me and said, “What are you doing here?” Later, I was sitting at an outdoor café table with my friend Sara Schechner. We were supposedly in Maine. As we talked, I reached out and held one of her hands. She started to withdraw it but then decided not to, giving me a funny look. We talked about seeing each other earlier in the summer in Maine. She described this weird infectious disease that she had caught. Still later, at the end of the afternoon, we came out of the countryside into a small town. The church was still open, with objets displayed as in a museum. It was crowded with people. My guide, who reminded me of my Brooklyn next-door neighbor, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, said, “I think we can leave now,” but at the same time he handed us large pieces of bacon to eat. “I’ve found a restaurant,” he said, adding, “If you don’t speak, they won’t know you’re not Italian.”
The morning of Tuesday, June 22, 2021
Much to their annoyance, I left a family group to go to a literary conference. I sat at a table in a wide hallway with a group of women poets, including my friend Roxi Power from Santa Cruz. There was a room nearby with large paintings on the wall, and another room beyond that with more paintings. I peeked into the first room a couple of times, especially at a painting at the end of the room near a small doorway into the next room. The painting was gigantic, the size of Warhol’s “Mao,” a brut expressionism reminiscent of the Danish painter Jorn, or even Basquiat. A guy who knew me appeared out of nowhere. I can see him now–thin, lanky brown hair. Who is he, I kept wondering, when did I know him? Camp Kennebec? Harvard? How could I get him to say his name? It would be insulting to ask him, because he seemed to know me very well. As we talked, we drifted toward the table with the women poets. The women couldn’t help me with his name, of course. He started saying something about Tech Hifi. I explained to the women that my late brother Sandy Ruby had founded the home electronics chain. Someone walked up to our table with a question about Pancho Villa, suggesting that the U.S.—and General Pershing—had dealt properly with him. I contested that, giving a little spiel on Villa, also on Emilio Zapata. One of the women exclaimed, “How do you know so much about that?”
Michael Ruby is a poet, literary editor and journalist. He is the author of eight poetry books, most recently Close Your Eyes, Visions (Station Hill, 2024), The Star-Spangled Banner (Station Hill, 2020), The Mouth of the Bay (BlazeVOX, 2019), American Songbook (Ugly Duckling, 2013) and Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010). His trilogy in prose and poetry, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill, 2012), includes ebooks Fleeting Memories (Ugly Duckling, 2008) and Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep (Argotist, 2011). His other ebooks are Close Your Eyes (Argotist, 2018) and Titles & First Lines (Mudlark, 2018). He co-edited Bernadette Mayer’s early books, Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Station Hill, 2015), and Mayer’s and Lewis Warsh’s collaboration Piece of Cake (Station Hill, 2020). He is currently co-editing a large selected poems of the late Steve Dalachinsky, and he is co-curator of the Station Hill Intermedia Project. He lives in Brooklyn and worked for many years as an editor of U.S. news and political articles at The Wall Street Journal.
