The autonomous wheelbarrow glides to my door.. In a dazzling blue sky, the wisp of cloud hangs suspended. Who sent this?

Whirring somewhere near, a vacuum cleaner hunches behind the wounded cherry tree. Pickers ignore the bleeding sap, moving on to nosh the crop. Who can say that it's not in Chekhov's notebook? Out there – and a cast of subliminals doing their dance? The whirring stops. They scurry back, quiggling happily.

A painter of words slathers the scene with bear grease and crushed garlic, hoping to throw hound dog editors off the track. “Mercy, mercy! Haven't we had enough?” And just coincidentally leaving readers free to darn socks.

“There is freedom in dullness,” and other sayings.

If the whole lot were set loose at once, bursting the gate with an unchained coffle, a liberation of porters from former lifetimes would overwhelm. Editorial schemes thus vindicated. And that trembling of bushes, out of earshot, making a likely murmur of metaphors, I'd say.

Out of our northwest region, home to the vagrant wisp, comes a stratus for serving suppressed storms. We never see the back room, or the mice out at night, or have to deal with quiggling.

Secrets of nature have unfathomable rules. (Another saying.) And there's just this whirring out there, somewhere.

How can this be remembered if it hasn't happened yet?

A red curtain falls to zero in that corner of the mind where silent sounds and blind images meet. It's not the same as hitchhiking with a blue daisy for a thumb.

Lady Hummingbird zooms in out of nowhere just as I slide open the patio door. She understands. Our conversation is in the key of purple flowers. At a distance of three or four inches, we eye each other without blinking. She siphons nectar with her silent beak. The fuchsia by the door screams. And the red zero, having come and gone, leaves a space of emptiness. She bobs and weaves.

I say hello.

Aswoosh of home spun reality puts Twinkie to sleep. She's not concerned with the graveyard of cars at night, city skyline lit up like a religious celebration, silent elevators mocking redwood groves, piles of trash not touched in conversations with the gardener, from a fairy tale cottage in professorville Palo Alto to a concrete slab at Castro Body Shop in Santa Clara, places and people with other dimensions. She sometimes snores, which you wouldn't expect of a domestic cat.

A leaf blowing through the air. Has it escaped? It is a butterfly's dream, blowing through a red light, ignoring the siren, disappearing.

A group of people gather round the crosswalk, including two AT&T technicians who are checking connections in the terminal box. No one has seen the leaf. If a tree falls in the forest and no technician is there, is there a sound? If no one is dreaming, is there a butterfly?

“Logic,” says the technician, “is simply making the right connections.”

“Watch out, watch out!” someone cries, pulling a young child to safety. “Mommy, mommy, I saw a butterfly!”

“Nonsense.”

But there it was, on top of the terminal box, slowly closing and opening its wings, connecting Japan, conversing with a young woman admiring the colors of her fan.

Slowly, the wheelbarrow glides on.