Dream Dinner

I suppose she was there as a guest, sitting second from the left in a row of five on the opposite side of a dining table. The table is long and rectangular, about a metre and a half wide, four metres long. Its top is fashioned out of eight or nine parallel wooden slats set within a frame. The surface has been left rough, unvarnished, oiled or otherwise treated with any sort of finish. I cannot see who sits at the head or the tail of this rude but imposing piece of furniture. Nevertheless, I am quite sure that these two, who fall beyond my field of vision, are our hosts. The others, who sit along the side where she is seated, are also somehow obscured. While clearly seen each of the cohort individually present a kind of formlessness. Their figures are somehow left undefined and, consequently, without any discernible identity. Do these four—one to her right, two to her left—wear hoods or are they so cramped and doubled over in some sort of spiritual disquiet that each are no more than a seething cloud to my eye? Certainly, I can feel their hurt, but they do not threaten, I do not feel they are in any way dangerous. Host and guest are diametrically opposed: unseen, identifiable and feared, observed, nondescript and impotent.