I see myself as a huge fiery comet, a shooting star. Everyone stops, points up and gasps, ‘Oh look at that!’ Then whoosh, and I'm gone….and they'll never see anything like it ever again—and they won't be able to forget me, ever.

—Jim Morrison

The poet makes himself a seer through a long, a prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, keeping only their quintessences. ….He arrives at the unknown: and even if, half crazed at the end, he loses the understanding of his visions, he has seen them! Let him be destroyed in his leap by those unnamable, unutterable, and innumerable things: there will come other horrible workers: they will begin at the horizons where he has succumbed.

—Arthur Rimbaud

My hound dog sleeps at my feet. His body shudders with dreams and they move through the threads of the thick quilts and blankets that cover me. Dreams enter us at the places where threads cover our skin, the woven threads and skin aligning, or, more directly, through the soles of our feet. Dreams enter hound dogs by day through the smooth black pads of their paws, when they run. Not being clothed with threads, all of the dreams of animals enter them straight through the earth.

I dream we are in a field. It is stubble, the stumps of grainstalks left after reaping. It is winter, fog. A gray rabbit is running through the field. The rabbit is a silver fire that trails across the stubblestalks and burns up at the horizon. My dog chases. They, both of them, rabbit and hound, cut a path across the earth that is both flat and curvature, both winding and straight, as all paths across the earth are.

Two animal shapes soft and furry and fiery, the fury of the chase, two four-chambered hearts pounding, and mine. Watching. (Am I in the field with them? Am I standing on that earth?)

This is the field of my childhood and thus the field I must cross in all my dreams to reach the borders of everything that lies beyond, and in dreams we are always cutting through the early years that lie inside us in which we saw the world so lucidly, so infinitely, our eyes like the eyes of rabbits.

In those early years I was always at the doorway, watching. I was always in the fields.

I remember the tangled brush piles where the foxes slept. And mink trails. The creek was a slow gold comet. The sycamore tree was a bolt of lightning I climbed to the fatherless sky.

My dog chases the rabbit. All is silent, all perfectly serene, when he pierces the rabbit’s throat with his long teeth. As if the rabbit were a plum, his teeth a silver knife. He runs with it hanging in his jaws, its head askew and limp. They are both together a dagger across the low sun. All bodies are in this celestial motion and the rabbit’s dreams enter the hound through the teeth (the only other way that dreams enter animals, the most direct).

I fall into the rabbit’s eye. (Yes, I know now I was there and do not remember if there was barbed wire or not.) The eye is a pool, perfectly still. It grows wider. I am swimming towards some kind of blackholeness or it is spreading toward me, the place where there is no blood, no teeth.

The rabbit’s eyes are my sister’s eyes. I dreamt of her two nights ago. In the dream I held her as a child—as I once held her, as a child, against me. I looked into her eyes and saw no colored iris, no pupil, no flowers blooming. A place where there were no bones to gnaw.

I yelled and the dog let the rabbit go. Its gray body dropped back to the earth and it bounded away the way it came, carrying an unalterable hole in its neck as the holes made by the teeth or knives or bullets of our hunters are always gaping unalterably in our throats, each of our words having to bound and leap and claw across that chasm, then having to pull back the barbed wire of the teeth before traveling beyond.

We walk into our dreams and go to the blackhole pools to swim, that we might hunt the hunter down inside us whose holes gape eternally across the universe, that we might catch the hunter in our jaws, the jaws that house our tongues which rock and cradle the breath before it is born, breaking into the broken world.

And is it love or what is hunting us.

Are there other hungers I do not know of. Lizards warm their blood against the stones, some other fire than inside. (When I wake, I want to walk barefoot across warm stones in winter sun, and I will call my sister.) The rabbit is bounding away, released by the hound, it is a silver fire again and its soft padded feet are like currents of night moving into the soil.

—Holly Haworth