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    Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born
    Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born
    Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born
    Ebook144 pages1 hour

    Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born

    By Anne Waldman

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    About this ebook

    “Awork of epic vision” reflecting our fraught contemporary moment of racial and gendered hatred, mass migration, global war, and terror (New York Journal of Books). Waldman appropriates the idea of William Blake’s unborn spirit of Thel to explore artists’ and activists’ roles during the Anthropocene. “Throughout, these long poems alternate between verse and prose, Eastern and Western philosophy, spiritual channeling and focused critique” (Publishers Weekly). “Juxtaposing lyric arcana, journalism, critical fragments, visions of mythic and mystic beings, narrative, polemics, and even ekphrasis, Waldman has created a work that is simultaneously jeremiad and psalm. It is, then, both fearful and celebratory, an epic of a ‘time before birth’” (Lyn Hejinian). Profoundly resonant, essential, and impassioned, Waldman’s latest work deserves to be read aloud to appreciate its deepest waters.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCoffee House Press
    Release dateMay 16, 2016
    ISBN9781566894395
    Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born

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      Book preview

      Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born - Anne Waldman

      BOOK 1

      Innocence

      like dreams of infants

      dumb-mute

      dumb-mute

      Citadels Thel Leaves Ringing

      Citadels Thel leaves ringing, not knowing what they are. Sounds of glee, celebration, a national holiday, or mourning the deaths of heroes. Not mourning the obscure deaths of heroes slaughtered in their beds only, but out at night on a mission, goggles lit up to scare a prowler a lover a ruined industrialist a terror advocate on a beat or out on the battlefield that is a control room thousands of miles away fighting for our way of life. This is new to Thel: checking out our way of life. Concept of bodiless weapon although she might guess at it. We have time travel. We have symbiogenesis. We have the Yogas of the Bardo. Life did not take over the planet by combat but by networking. But now we have apparatuses to mount a deadly thought on a track to take out a wedding party, to target someone we have never met. If we do meet it will be in the hell of the Slough of Despond, where people did not heed the pleas of children. Neuroscience says help, solve. Solve? Salve. Way of life when she who has not been born yet is still on the other side. Cave with child handprints, fingers reach to the other side, thin membrane thrums to a spirit world. Other bastions of power on the wasteland that is our metaphysical foundation, empires of the unborn. We visit a moon of Saturn. We contemplate Mars. We circle asteroids with a strange anticipation. We go interstellar. We like the sound of wormhole. It is magic. Thel without footprint, without trace, desiccated, desolate, nothing around, nugatory. Thel who talks with a worm. Thel a figment in the mind of becoming-in-life, of potential, of not-becoming-yet-in-mind, just got dreamed up, a proposal is Thel’s gambit for one who would be cautious. Caution overrides curious. Becoming-curious retreats in the caution mill. Will not engage. Thel becoming angel, though not ministering. Will not turn forward or turn counter-wise. Does not want to burn in the night. But the walls of a discotheque close in, outside her mind, stampede stomps down fragile teen bones. Crunch and twist under the mayhem. Thel is not mayhem. She eschews the nightmares of stampede, of mayhem. Would not go there would not enter. Thel is not empire. Thel is a wisp you trusted but hardly noticed. Brushed from your eye. Swatted away. Small filament in the bright day that gleams. Does one gleam before vanishing? If so, ready. Thel in prison. Thel without a pencil to her name. But a prophetic ray from the corridor’s light to see her by. Almost forgotten: of Not ready? Not ready yet? Thel as principle mover in this text of redemption from anterior charnel ground, the place from which all life and death evolves. Thel floats she floats again she floats above vicissitudes, decay, and fecund possibility because unborn. Floats. Thel resolves to play the mummer if we can use that word resolve. There is no resolve in unbornness. To play dumb-mute when Thel exhausts her questions of quantum futurity. Mummer’s play within the poem. Set the stage: Child enters in gauzy costume of quantum futurity before the rough textures set in. Sings lines. Bows, collapsing bodies at the close. Slings of child eyes, arrow, a stone incubating for the heel of day, for terminus. The pit, the grave, images of the shrouded bodies of little children lined up for burial. Brutal world. When will Thel arise, meet her own power? Thel’s physique is small, she trembles with the insubstantial leaf. Her actor is similar, mirrors her ancient sister, plays her odd passive panic, quizzical small glimmerlight in eye to ask why, Why alive? Be alive? Hell’s image is of a glaze you will not see in this life. Perhaps under the sea, illusory aught by a natural-although-filtered light. That light will have traveled centuries to meet a face before its assumption. Faces will tell Thel not always what she needs to know. What need she know? She is ascending. When Thel lifts her head, flowers feel it in their cellular dance. She is like water for them, she is a kind of thirst unsatiated. Her Offworld is womblike, and safe to venture out when the metabolism is not cloaked not clocked. The unborn reaches into her vocabulary to starry a sentence that would relieve the others of their woes and cares but because she is not established, no home! No shelter! She does not know her way about, mistakes her standing, her possibility for survival, the postures that she should take with Other, with outside. She considers the limits of human existences that can be crossed briefly within a life. She is tested in this catachresis. Limits. Borderlines. Will outside ever help. In Offworld? You have a fine reticulation, a soft spot or harbor for innocence. When the lights roll Thel will be gone. She will find the semantics to disappear. But first she will manifest her conceptual power. Her androgyny.

      A meme of unbornness, a Philosophia Mundi, will be from the other side, in a state of grace before jumping back on the wheel. Didacters, take note. Detractors, back to your neuroscience labs. Light years away from the hospital station, waiting for news, suited up with gear to avoid the waking living walking dead whose contact might waste you away. The night the friend’s heart stopped, those in the car below her apartment heard a knocking on the car, Wake up, my friends, I am trying to reach you. She could move through walls. My poets! I am watching you. She was everywhere as we cast her ashes in various spots that were entwined with her identity. I see you, the ashes sang. We heard her in our minds. Thel back on the other time’s side. Back to Offworld. What can she bring back to us? The armored personnel, the doctors and nurses and aid workers and other trainees who risk lives in the interminable plague and triage dynasties. Recognize her light gait. Thel hovering. Shut their hearts on you. Seen too much been too much there done that going to take care of my world move too much farther out move away from this contagion. Leagueless under sea, or in my Offworld conveyor, a belt to the heavens. Thel understands physics without the terminology. She travels, she wears herself out. Poor, nowhere to go.

      What is Thel’s relation to objects? Can she touch the amalgam become a sorcerer of offers, the accoutrement of animal parts and their attendant powers, Thel be a magician when she decides to enter bodily? What is her mount? Tiger, antelope, lark, serpent, worm? There’s an animation of the inorganic in all this writing. She could grab the rattle and shake it. She could restrain the molecules before dissolution. Would she notice mayflies and sing a villanelle?

      But wait. The page does not resist, the appendages are those of factotum

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