A scarecrow, a gift, a sack of dirt

I dreamed it was late night outside a shanty shack. We waited on the porch with Saint Joseph. There were no stars. I told him that his son, Jesus, would have to be crucified again. He was aghast: hadn't he suffered enough already? In the distance, an image of the Christ, his features cloaked in shadow, on the cross, like some lonesome scarecrow in a field. But then, Joseph continued, he had returned to life once before, hadn't he? Joseph burst into song, and the meadow erupted in flowers and light.

*

I dreamed my mother-in-law had prepared us a dish: couscous, peppers, fresh kiwi and mangoes. It all looked wonderful. I didn't understand why, but accepted the gift gladly.

*

I dreamed I was driving an old Ford pickup along the Western side of the Passaic river, in Passaic itself. I was searching for a way onto Route 21 North. In the back of the truck I was hauling a sack of dirt that was spilling out onto the road behind me. I made an abrupt turn, and almost drove into a trench, in which several men were working, pushing manual heavy rollers to even the ground. I hollered at the boss. Nobody could see these guys working, coming around the corner fast like that. The paid me no mind.

I finally ended up parking and getting on a strange elevated subway that ran underneath the highway. I was speaking with a lady reporter, her teeth and gums abnormally large for her mouth, and carrying the frayed sack of dirt, soil flung all about me on the otherwise clean subway car. An African-American gentlemen watched me trying to wrangle the fast-shrinking bag, and raised an eyebrow in a bemused manner, but nobody said anything about the mess I was creating. The car creaked along slowly over the water.