The Brooklyn Rail

Alice, Passing by the Visitations 

                           Dreams are predictive and mind sharing.  

                                                                         —Alice Notley 

Plants, dwarf plants
Asteroids & comets
Venus a rocky scorched landscape
Primordial’s last day              rubble
Arab moon                 a panopticon’s mainstay
invented newly named orbs more “north stars”
      wondering appointing worrying
animation toward a Queen of Pentacles
            our ghost wells and wheels
& enigma  :    our wares  :     voyages of the messenger
                   & heading north, beyond homelands
hands in the well
     When I asked her, serve, how?
A lily, a crystal orb?    
          she:   It would be permanent, I would write
as dreamed I might from desert those lovely things
forever
         primary.  …..language ….. somehow rams
             a winged oracle, as in a color wheel  
miracle, emanation
she:   You would feel this liberation in what I say
however crazy and insincere the ice moons
they are ever estranged
It was a cold night lost you in the heat
 A hymn of mourning that day that day’s
Lasting light, holding you though a far away form
All the long day long week …..body closer, come
far
Then            Dark
      threnody.  Of discipline and lamentation
 riffing the puns for any listening
  The Salon des Refuses
 (souls days on what the fuses say)
In the dream a cabinet of workers went weak
who wondered fate      locked in installation
felt one could just walk off    pay love to a breaker of taboos
in a foreign land, Moroccan where people make of wood
their whistle, their star at forehead, veiled, chiseled
        female emanation, the men sat and cried
 spiritual freedoms who cry “Chorus, chorus!”
with instrument of feminist prophecy
 Wings & horns. “Chorus, chorus!” come back
O Aliss.      
        Adept ever surrenders her love & imagination
lineament of other place
becomes a babe of the abyss for you
Ancient evenings you irk shape in words as creatures
Of desire
To break the shell of the body
To sit at her feet, now
Worship her ground
Only she walks upon

We made it so far within the Atomic Age,
families in fix of war
instill the walking sticks, once again
staffs of our vocality
vocabulary
old torch shedding light on our
shadows, nightmarket tonight
 Jemaa el-Fna
Under tents of generosity
               trills and whispers of mosque and nervous
eyes glitter in the dance,
        as if charmed by snakes
born to cut the quick of precarious nights that take such
              imagination eld                   most contemporary
A list of ancient muses fierce insights and passion
the opens garden and heresies and attachment
a topology of purr   opens our heads off
see who traverses the sky with a scrimshaw orchid!
the code of three orchids!  I thought maybe falcon
(it was owl some say came too)
                  open any book

—Anne Waldman, Huautla 8/25