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5 Female Poets Next To A Block Of Ice
(—Wrestle the damn dream down!)
-
E.S.
This was the dream
where I left the palm and
stereo at home
left my fatigues at home
I became lost in a Theatre of Reading
I was provoked by aggressive
how-to book titles bobbing out at me
as I passed the (fluctuating) shelves
“Incapably Positive
Chronicles”
“Received Ideas
But In No Things Received”
“The President
Is Not Projective Thirst You Can Be Too”
“My Hands Are
Tongue-Tied”
“More Than Laura
Riding Knows”
I open a volume, hands
shaking but my condition ordered me to salute
Heil!
I felt like Queen Mab, I
wanted to eat nightshade
and ply the spirits of poesia out of their caves
My sisters –all four
of them –reminded me of
the Library in Alexandria
– think of it before it’s sacking!
-(time is a spiral)
and suggested how one might behave
in such a place –
such a Memory
Palace, you need, girlfriends, to bow
Joanne was seen polishing
marble
Diane remained in samadhi
Alice
had her glasses on to scrutinize a miniature map
Eleni was eager for the card
catalogue, she started “And you?”
She was enceinte, she held
the future in a book
I was a lumpen proletariat,
a deadbeat, a shaman
I wanted him, the only
librarian in the room (snap fingers)
to be a nurturing woman
librarian
The world was askew how get
it right again?
Stacks of glassine Duncan,
Olson thin, weathered Ginsberg,
his pages long with hair
it wa s “all
about” Spicer’s grail, the Enron scandal
It was “all
about” death in war, torture
The empire of reading was
clear
You needed special glasses
provided by Homeland Security
But here there was no
“home”, there was no “secure”
But something was going to
change, get born.
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