She led me to a cave in that wild place,
And sate beside me, with her downward face
Illumining my slumbers, like the Moon
Waxing and waning o'er Endymion.
And I was laid asleep, spirit and limb,
And all my being became bright or dim
As the Moon's image in a summer sea,
According as she smiled or frowned on me;
And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed:
Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead:--
for at her silver voice came Death and Life,
Unmindful each of their accustomed strife,
Masked like twin babes, a sister and a brother,
The wandering hopes of one abandoned mother,
And through the cavern without wings they flew,
And cried, 'Away, he is not of our crew.'
I wept, and though it be a dream, I weep.
Though being your father's daughter and invisible you took up with the street rats hanging at the courthouse at night and carved your name into the soft old brick with a stone you pocketed in case you might remember what flying is like, watching, listening to the flagpole crack in its foundation while in turn they'd foot the rope loop and swing out over the street below again and again, the flagpole pinging as one did on the playground in wind the four grades Modoc schooled you in getting the crap beat out of you for crying all the time, which you did--cried all the time--and loathed and regretted and panicked about but could stop as well as breaking the fall of any one of the flagpole dares once lifted up and out into the fall that could break you of ever wanting to do it again, fly, cry: what they call borderline in the personality disorders field, the self always already between flying and crying, and because there is no self to attend, because invisible, the self who checks their faces for vestiges of you, the careless, unguarded, phantom recognition of you, the phallic flagpole ping: you: anonymous but for them--Darren, Jim--who did, fly, see:
me:
