in the antediluvian island in the primordial swamp Hardwood was already my friend

The porcelain basin of memory is black I spit down it brushing my feral tooth.

_____________________

‘A double? oh really badly’

I have a double a self I can’t stand

I was discovered by primordial Columbus and became his land? Cliché says Hardwood.

_____________________

Wanting the real and as a dream is a dream I try to remember something: the trees at Blythe at night, going home inside the steel cab of a pickup, road lined with athol trees. salty, drab. Home gone to feels empty a little shakily and that’s more like a dream than a memory.

No I want real and dreamed to be fused into the real rip off this shroud of division of my poem from my life.

______________________

I am a reflex an E for effort (what I can’t stand)–

equal to a shroudperson.

______________________

Eating eels near the Loire I learn to slither not between poles but being the one pole the river.

______________________

Now that I’ve visited an étang I always had visited one– I knew these swamps when the stars. An island of Sumer, no dead other dark woman or enemy-maker.

From Grave of Light (Wesleyan University Press), by Alice Notley © 2006.