Dreams:  Driving through a central Michigan countryside.  Pass a two story white farmhouse with teenage boys milling around outside.  See the head of a blue cattle dog lying on the dirt.  Just the head.  Its eyes watch me as I pass.  There is also a green and yellow budgie the size of a pigeon rolling drunkenly in a ditch and an equally inebriated rabbit.  A small boy picks up the rabbit and flings it in the grass.  I don't like the look of the boys but I like less the look of everything else.  I stop the car and engage a black haired boy about fifteen in conversation.  Tell him I am worried about the appearance of the bird and the rabbit but say nothing about the dog.  In the meantime the others have built a small mound out of dirt and placed the dog's head on that.  It still watches the proceedings with a calm and interested air.  Does the farmer use pesticides, I ask.   If he does and it has had such a serious effect on these animals it may be affecting you too.  I urge him to call his local vet.  The dog bothers me.  Why is it still alive.  Why has it been beheaded.  The boy is polite and articulate but beneath the surface something unsavoury watches.

I am at a bbq or outdoor party.  Again it is central Michigan.  Birds fly squawking overhead.  I lean back and watch.  The mixed flock of birds circle and wheel overhead.  I don't know why they don't fly elsewhere.  Then I see a large white bird like a gannet catch a small sparrow in its beak.  The sparrow's head pokes out of the beak.  I can see the moist blackness of its eye.  I am sick with sorrow.  Always death.

Walking along a dirt road with Nicki.  Yesterday (in real life) I heard a male neighbour screaming, using an obscenity.  Don't know whether he screamed at his wife, children or the animals.  It bothered me as it was a sentence, unintelligible as most of it was, of pure rage.  His children and his wife and the animals were all a witness.  Nicki walks and lays her hand on my shoulder as she talks.  It lays there very heavy.  I wish she would remove it.  The screaming man's wife comes to me.  She is upset with her husband.  She is emotionally fragile after giving birth.  The husband is contrite.  We are all in the back seat of a car.  A very pale, almost ghostly young woman gets in with us.  The wife has hysterics.  She is frightened of the woman's whiter than white skin.  There is something uncanny about it but the woman is very much alive, very much flesh and blood.  The wife insists on leaving.  She is inconsolable.  I do my best to calm her down.  She leaves the phone off the hook.  I hear a tinny voice later and realise it's her husband.  It's all too messy.  Something about diving underwater too, unfortunately in the time it has taken me to type the above the memory of it has gone.