“My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.” –Virginia Woolf

“I want to know death and yet live to tell it.”—Elizabeth Willis 

1

Nurse maids, mermaids, and convalescent old maids,

Beds made and stripped naked, 

Frills and furbelows ruffling the edgy,

Rippling body harnessed to mind.

But what is this mind of which you speak?

Gemynd or memory in Old English 

Or Chitta in Pali and Sanskrit, 

The qualitative condition on which we float

This floating world, this rooted realm

Of evanescent flashes, dark sparks.

Imagine you’re causally connected to the islet of Virginia. 

Such looks, such eyelash elongators, alligators 

Surrounding this rusty pump of a plum 

lady, this misused muse, this jaded Jane 

Whose beach knows no apparitions, though a lighthouse!

A house of light prays in her, pays homage

To the space in her, remains of her. 

Take refuge in her settled rooks; risen rooks; randy 

Rocks that speak back, parlanced air. Nuanced.

Should you desert your form rooms, worm roots, and libraries?

Lay down your language on liquid’s surface as your being is dismissed?

2

Virginia’s poetry and madness slid through the river’s tapered fingers

As a sleepwalker undresses, 

      first her gown, then her ghost,

A surgical procedure to excise her mind’s 

Illness in an amniotic solution, vapor 

Voices that wouldn’t steam out of her.

3

Mind travels thousands of years on concurrent currents across ocean and bodies of mind. 

It sits in the wading pool of this moment, moon leaping like silver fish as reflection on surface. 

No wind raises mind’s waves though streams of thought slice into it, 

No light shines on the languageless languid experience of the original one.

“Bring me your mind,” the rooks ask. 

“I have searched high and low for it and could not find it. I have searched 

in my bodhi tree. In its deep, extended roots, in its heart-shaped leaves

and slender twigs, in its clusters of figs. I am immersed now in it, plunging

in its slipstream, its dark locks entangled in my breath, shucked down my throat,

canopying my nostrils. The bubbles gradually burn on the bonfire haze in the lungs.

Slowly an arm that holds a lamp on the horizon raises it up to see into me, a garden

of trees, an insubstantial djinn, the slang of birdsong, filling. 

4

Lips locked 

As she slips

With walking stick

And water meadows