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ANNE WALDMAN




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.