Banging the blue shutters–night-rain;and a deep gash opened in the yard.By noon, the usual unstinting sunbut also the wind, the olive trees gone silver,inside out, and the slender cypresses,like women in fringed shawls, hugging themselves,and over the rosemary hedge the pocked figgiving its purple scrota to the ground.What was it had made me sad? At the market,stall after noisy stall, melons, olives,more fresh herbs than I could name, tomatoesstill stitched to the cut vine, the softtransparent squid shelved on ice; also,hanging there beside the garlic braids,meek as the sausages: plucked fowl with feet.Under a goose-wing, I had a violent dream:I was carrying a baby and was blind,or blinded on and off, the ledge I walkedblanking out long minutes at a time.He’d flung a confident arm around my neck.A spidery crack traversed his china skull.Then it was not a ledge but a bridge, like a tongue.From the window over my desk, I could look downat the rain-ruined nest the sangliershad scrabbled in the thyme, or up, to the baldmountain in all the paintings. I looked up.That’s where one looks in the grip of a dream.