Yeats

 

June 20, 2022

Dream before waking: I’m staying in Dublin in a place next to a wilderness area. The wilderness area features a long, wide path leading through woods and great meadows and wetlands, coming out in a slightly different place each time, so you can jog the trail and see something different each time. I take the trail and discover that only a little turn leads me back into a part of the city with which I am unfamiliar, I jog onto a city street and encounter a giant billboard, with notices on it of a celebration of the life of William Butler Yeats, where his grandson will appear. A man peers out a window next to the billboard, and shouts at me, “You’re Yeats, aren’t you?” It’s the first moment in the dream when I realize I’m Yeats’ grandson, and the celebration is the reason why I’m in Dublin. I say I am, and then I have a discussion with the man on how I was of a certain age before my father told me we were related to somebody famous, and thus lost out on all those years of renown and invitations to exotic places. 

Drinking my coffee in the slant light of morning I watched two brown rabbits nibbling grass in the garden. They were soon joined join by a rat, which was not as alarming in that context as it would have been on its own. I suppose the apartment dumpster next door to be a haven of rats.