Alice Notley

from Above the Leaders

The Goddess of Difficult Beginnings. Where you
see around my wrist the path of a 
bracelet, Magellanic clouds like hair of the dead
Because tall    Where crisis and perplexity
     are not real
When you were walking unsteadily past the Phenix
then dreamed of the future that night with nothing to
     stake but your shakiness
on a book where one will live.
Worrying about the fate of a country as if fate were rightly
     chosen thieves and murderers,
not three weird women. 

I love you brother, though
I am finally taller than our nation
Can a concept, all that we are, be out of its mind? 
So, I keep growing. The Fates told me this would
happen. Above the leaders I wait, forsaken until invoked.