" Midwinter Day," as Alice Notley noted, "is an epic poem about a daily routine." A poem in six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day-morning, afternoon, evening, night-to dreams again: ". . . a plain introduction to modes of love and reason/Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season/Now I've said this love it's all I can remember/Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December//Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/That takes the bite from winter weather/And weaves the random cloth of life together/And drives away the long black night!"

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Chapter One

Stately you came to town in my opening dream

Lately you've been showing up alot

I saw clearly

You were staying in the mirror with me

You walk in, the hills are green, I keep you warm

Placed in this cold country in a town of mountains

Replaced from that balmier city of yours near the sea

Now it's your turn to fall down from the love of my look

You stayed in the hotel called your daughter's arms

No wonder the mother's so forbidding, so hard to embrace

I only wait in the lobby, in the bar

I write

People say, "What is it?"

I ask if I must tell all the rest

For never, since I was born

And for no man or woman I've ever met,

I'll swear to that,

Have there been such dreams as I had today,

The 22nd day of December,

Which, as I can now remember,

I'll tell you all about, if I can

Can I say what I saw

In sleep in dreams

And what dreams were before your returning arms

Took me like a memory to the room I always return to

When thought turns to memory's best love, I learn to

Deny desire from an acquired habit of vigilant fear

Till again to my nursed pleasure you and this love reappear

Like a story

Let me tell you what I saw, listen to me

You must be, you are the beginning of the day

When we are both asleep you waken me

I'm made of you, you must hear what I must say

First I thought I saw

People all around me

Wondering what it is I write, I saw up close

The faces of animals, I slid down a long grassy hill

Past everyone doing everything, I was going faster

There were no streets to cross, no dignity lost,

A long story without pausing

I was racing, no one approved of what I was learning,

I saw a woman's daughter, we met on the stairs

I saw everything that was ever hidden or happening

I saw that my daughters were older than me

But I wanted to see further

Nobody including you

Of all the people doing things, was approving

Of my sliding like this down the long tilting hill

Past the place to play and all the past

I saw the moon's

Last quarter in the southern sky at dawn

Then I saw

The shawls of the dream as if they were the sky

And the dream's dark vests and the dream's collar and cuffs

Of black leather on the dream's black leather jackets

I was alone in the dream's dressing room trying on

Different styles of tough gang-wear or raingear

In the dream my daughters Sophia and Marie

Are always with me

Then we climb

A mountain to the Metcalf's house, Nancy's fixing us

The eighteen intricate courses of a Japanese dinner

We sit at a counter curving around the kitchen

Like what they call a kidney-shaped pool

Eating hearts of heads of wet red and green lettuce

In the most high and palmy state of friendly love

Then Paul takes us all on a trip

A while ago

The Japanese lady who lives next door smiled

When Marie smelled the fragrance of her cultivated rose

Sometimes dream is so rampant, so wild

As to seem more luxuriant than day's repose

So without riot spreading everywhere

How can I be both here and there?

Then I found

A message in an over-sized book

On the way to Allen Ginsberg's nursery school

Where Ken Kesey was conducting a big picnic

Then I saw

All the buildings of New York drawn to look

Like the illustrations in a children's book

I dreamed

The road was so slippery from a truck's oil spill

We had to stop at a truckstop

Though our friends who were ahead of us might lose us

All the food in this place is served in a big dollhouse

And the salad's in a hatbox, they're catering to us

It's hilarious, suddenly we all crack up

We say

You don't just eat from the desire to see a vine

Which today is called a chicken sandwich

You do seem to eat because you wear a hat and so

The hat's box is empty and must be filled with food

Do you see what I mean, it was a special restaurant

I was with Grace Murphy

Then I dreamed

I was ordering pompoms

Not those ornamental tufts on hats and not chrysanthemums

But a kind of rapid-firing machine gun

Really I can't figure out what's good and what's bad

I know I want to awaken feeling

Some remembered perfection

For which I crave a homeopathic dose of evil

Like the hair of the dog in the proverb

To offset the unsteady state of memory

What man or woman

Could this be involving, so fleet it is indulging

In not quite flying but dreaming, flaunting

The short-lived continuity of a sound like hummingbirds

What is a story

Can I say that here

Or should I wait till later wherever the question

Of life's chronology of satisfying the favored senses

Might better gratify the falling course of the grave day

As I must come closer to inevitably waking up

Like a dying man is dying spoiling the favor

You might grant me to extend this liberal time

And remit my punishment due though I've confessed already

And been forgiven

Are you going to convince me

There's nothing more to dream up

Like sins not committed but related anyway

To cover innocence

Always listening to everything you see,

Watching the sounds of the day

Wouldn't it be possible

To eat everything

All the collected foods even you

And one's self like the dinosaurs just dying out

In some unaccountable hungry fall, cunningly saintlike

The night cometh

When no man can work

And David saw that Saul was come out to seek his work

I dream

I vault the fence, there's a cheerleader

Who needs to be kissed and caressed, it's like a blizzard,

Like my father I lost my color wheel when I died

I go vaulting over the consequent fence and with my ambition

I meet Gregory Peck

I always do

He looks like you

We go to the movies again, we go to two, we always do

And all the children are put,

Thrust, driven, goaded, impelled and flung,

Urged and pushed into bed

Then I can dream

We move again to the house where I was born

I'm wandering and forgetting, we are arranging

What rooms each of the children will finally sleep in

"Can Marie sleep in the hall bedroom

or is Andrew still alive?"

Andrew, who's like Bill

Or Bill's like him,

this state of things in dreams

could kill friendship if I told all

even to Uncle Andrew

who's also alot like Clark

Anyway I know we must share this copied house

With my grandfather, another Andrew, who is a little mean

Now everybody's here in this room and we are a party to death

I look at the old uncle who is still young Andrew or Bill

I am trying to remember where in time I am

I study his face but all I see is plain expression

Not the look of a man who's dead and knows it

Like something or someone nobody absolutely needs to know

I decide not to say anything about it

Already I've looked closer without moving to him,

A man without responses but that's beyond all this,

I say to myself in dream it's all the same

All the people in this room will surely die some time

Who cares which ones are already dead, I'm just here now

In my dream like I always am among the charms

Of sweet Andrew, charming Bill, I can't go on

Is there an end

To such love and the duty of dreaming,

Things seen eyes closed not seeming to be dreams

Like the blackest edges once I saw outlining

Each leaf in spring one year or the jewels I saw

With Grace lying together before a thunderstorm

I could suggest to her then and she to me

What kind of thing would appear to us next

In the train of the vision moving from right to left

Under love's closed eyes

I hope you can see as much

When I try to suggest among lines of the evaporating word

What idea I've seen, what image each dream heard

There's no end to a narration of forms

From all the ways of looking eyes closed

Now I see

What's ordinary like a sky

Or weather I can hear without ever looking

As blind people suddenly given sight

Sometimes will abhor it and shut their eyes again

To be more conversant with the actual view

And I know

You too can see better in the dark

Love's eyes open anyway behind your quiet shoulder

I dream you awaken and it's day

I wish for the night of our reassuring love

Daily taken to the market and all kinds of stores

To be ridiculed and fooled, ignored and reduced

Daily tested by the tedium of uncondensed routine

Long mornings and lightless afternoons that exist in time

Till the night for both our work and love

Makes us feel love is the same

Before we had children

We used to work all night, eyes open, then sleep

For the day, eyes closed to people's mornings

If we could

We'd walk out independent seeing everything so benefitting

Us, the sun and moving, then sleeping

Among our bright love, the path of the sun becoming

A modest warning of something we were studying

Now that our days

Are full of normal parts

It seems we have all lived forever so far

Eyes open, eyes closed, half-open, one eye open

One closed to the coming day, past's insistence,

Dream's vivid presence, no one knows why

Though you can see all I say with half an eye

I always have an eye to fascination, you catch my eye

This meditation

Not on sleep but on awakening

With dreams with everything quickening, you and I

Survive this work and rest, not so much lost,

We only seem to dream as quickly as we live

One for the other to make up time

And it's as if

Today I had someone else's dreams

Everything's the reverse of what it seems

Alone at last, I'm also with you

The weather's fine, the sky's not only blue

Like long preludes

I dream I don't want to get into this

But it's soothing and exciting like weathering

This desire for you, you are being blown maybe away

Maybe from me by two men maybe they're women

I don't know

At Ted and Alice's house, it's like love

I was mad, I was jealous, it was like love

It must be

That dreaming has its effect on dreams

Lying on a bed

In the dream Ted is on the phone like the Thomas Edison,

Tom, Ed or even John Thomas or the anonymous electrician

That he is he said and Alice said it's silly to be dead

Or jealous either but I feel mute, dumb and mad

And thus alive to those two women or are they men

Who are giving you a blowjob or at least repairing you

Which has to do with something Alice said and something

Bill said about the dangers of another

The other is two

Is this a clue to wake up from dreams

And see what I'm forgetting?

Then a woman

I was watching was laid

Forgive me

On a table for something medical to be done

Like the glimpse of a scene I innocently noticed

In a movie on t.v.

God please let me

Be released

Like all songs' version of all loss of love

From the movie version of any of my memories

Let me go,

"Incident in San Francisco,"

let me be

I've seen all this before just as innocently

Do I have to add

That in this sense I'm an incestuous guilty whore

Please love me anyway even if I dream my blood

Must be exchanged for the blood of another relation

Before your eyes made new like my old reputation

Something was introduced into the system or taken,

An operation, no clearer to me than I've made it to you,

Sorry,

That's how it was, I was watching a woman

And something was being done to her tentatively

Then recovered we sat down together to eat

A large flat dull dry cake like awful life

I broke it into pieces in my adolescent plate

Mothers and fathers

Beware of these bereft dream cakes

Not like Nancy's mother's milk potato pancakes

But dry and without salt and fat preserving life

Desultory and unleavened like communion

As pleasant to taste as the host eaten at a funeral Mass

I do take in this sado-masochistic ceremony

Obviously not medical but

Cannibalistically sexual, primal and hereditary

It reminds me

Of Marie's fascination with watching

Sophia's response to pain

And in this revolting sextet of dreams

Where there are two of everyone in every scene

I am watching and hungry to wait

While something's done to someone

Not me or Bill or Nancy or Andrew

But Lewis who, if I need him

Can stand in in dreams for my entire past

Not to speak of

His love for Bill and Bill's for him, Nancy's mothering,

My love for that pleasure, for her,

Paul and Bill and Lewis and all their parents,

Formidable Adrian, not Paul and Nancy's daughter of that name

But another one who's dark

The dream's not exactly fair

Their other daughter's name is Ann, Nancy's had two girls,

So have I, so did my mother and Beverly, that's Bill's wife

There are two Bills

And so to take a breath

If Bill and Paul (and Lewis) could be fathers to me

Because each is a man who has had two daughters

Then they could also be

The two men in the dream who became two women

Must I go on?

Ted and Alice have two boys

And Ted could be short for Theodore, my father's name

So even if the two men were Ted and Alice's two sons

It's clear the women they became were my two daughters

Seducing their father

Do you see what I mean?

No wonder I was so mad

And that's why the woman had to have an operation

Bill said

An old Greek woman he used to pass on the street

Saw him with his two daughters and said

"A big man like you! Why not produce sons!"

If Lewis

Is my father and my daughter is my mother

After whom she's named

Then all this confusion in the dream

Legitimizes the scene and it is not incest

First girls

As infants love their mothers who are women, then girls

Learn how to love men unless they become homosexuals;

Boys love their mothers first too and can continue

To love women when they grow up

Unless they're homosexuals

The mothers of men and women

Are always being loved more later by sons

Than by daughters who seem to love fathers better

Because that's the way it is

They say

Women love later in a more complicated way

Than men who never had to learn to change

The sex

Of what they call the love object

Though they might have anyway

There's more to it than that

Like a woman's identification with a hat or the ground

Or a man's with cars, wars or the other way around

Bill said

His brother belongs to the Hare Krishnas

Who only want to have sons, not daughters

Like the old idea of throwing them in the river

This dream unnerved me

Famous Lewis isn't Theodore, gift of God, nor is Ted

I'm not Marie Ann Bernadette

I'm Bernadette Frances Catherine

My daughter has a teddy bear

Fuck this shit!

Let's get on with it, let's die of fucking respect

This respectable mourning is fucking forbidden

Day's desirable plans are dressed like dreams

Which sell the whole of what I already bought once

Back to me, night's deal, to become a part

Of day's dalliance with the logic of dream's art

I'd like to open

A stationery store

In a small New England town, it'd be called

The Scarlet Letter

I dream I'm Lillian Hellman

Meeting Jane Fonda

I don't know why, as far as I know

Lewis' Aunt Julia is fine, perhaps it's because Heather,

A name like Pearl, is the name of the printer's daughter

And his business is called the Hawthorne Press

Which reminds me

Of another dream about a luncheonette

Like this random rhyming this joint was Puerto Rican

And like Mike's Variety which used to sell stationery

In this narrow town, it was a long narrow place

Kind of what you might call a hole in the wall

In the dream

We live upstairs like the local grocer Reno Cimini

Who reminds me of the Borgia's or a burgher

Running a place you can run down to for coffee to go

In the dream

They served hot spiced jelly at a clean white counter

The jelly's on a lazy Susan, I feel I'm on vacation

Keith Thompson,

Heather's father, is behind the counter

Saying how hard it is to run a small business

Just like Hawthorne, he says, who ran a bookstore

Combined with a pepper mill, as we all know

Maybe it was called

The Scarlet Letter in the dream, I can't remember

It's night

I stay a long time, then you

Come limping and staggering down the street

Lewis, why are you so old and so sick?

Then I see

It's not you at all, it's only my mother

And once again

I help you down the street, you're complaining

I remember you're interrupting all my fun

Dear Lewis,

When I imagine something's wrong with me

I immediately attribute this weakness to you

And in this way I make you stand in for my mother

As I'm sure most people who live together secretly do

I do apologize, I know you are completely another

Then Bob Callahan

Pretending to be Don Byrd

Came to snap our picture and we felt he might steal our souls

He had a craggy old face like the detective

In Nicolas Freeling's books, Henri Castang

I looked at Bob's face while he posed us

He said you must hold still for two whole minutes

The camera starts buzzing and clicking by itself

Like a time exposure gone haywire except you could see inside

To the shutter and the lens like a lentil,

All the secret future

Then I said

Please only do our profiles, it's much too long to look

And that's when someone brought in my old broken trunk

We were going to use it but I guess Marie broke it

And the whole inside or lining of the trunk was coming out

I think to myself I guess that's my body

And this means I'm dreaming isolation is more healthy

Than having a family

Saying this seemed to make sense

Then I said

I guess it's really broken and cannot be repaired at all

And that's the end

How suggestible

As in a dream of leaves under fluorescent lighting,

Next I dream I am imitating your handwriting

These dreams are like

Arithmetic by Plato, I can count and figure the shadow

Of each mother, daughter, father, each representative

I dream

A strong brown woman not a black woman but a woman

Named Brown who stands for a rich motherly woman

Has us to her house for a party

It's a house like an institution with a gymnasium

Then Cadillacs

And big Lincolns and Mercedes Benz's

All line up by the side of the road for an assassination

There's a meeting of men

All the sons of the people of the world at the party

And suddenly

Men on motorcycles come and assassinate all of them

We're standing directly in the dream's line of fire,

Sophia, Marie and I, but we don't get hit

Then we

Have to tell the woman her son is dead, shot

By a gang of assassins, there's a complication,

She doesn't seem to notice us

The party's moved

To an indoor swimming pool like in "Alphaville"

Where people dive into the water while they're being shot at

She says, "It's a happy occasion today" and we all say

She must be a strong woman to deal in such a way

With the death of her only son

The way daughters-in-law

In books murder the rich mothers of their husbands

To steal money and property and love away from them

Like in Sabine where an old woman poet is murdered

Because of her house

This is the mathematics

I'm the mother and the poet

Something is inferred about an artist who died

The daughters are intact, the dream-sons are murdered

What's the equation

When the mother of the fear of daughters

Is the artist not the patroness of double sons,

Has she lost less?

Is she the opposite of strong?

They say it's a happy occasion when a baby's born

They say about the weather, what we curse we bless

The rich woman now stands for the mother

And the only son who died is the father

I can't continue with this

Then Gregory Peck

Sat in the front seat of the car and kissed his girlfriend,

She was only ten or eleven years old, he reminds me of you,

We were at another party and he was on the phone to Hollywood,

Who are the sons of Solomon?

I denigrated the wine

As being too sweet, then the maid pointed out

Each bottle still had a price label,

$26.75

How prodigal all these rich people are like the trees

I tried to find a way to get free of the indulgent rigidity

Which made me resent good wine in a dream

I poured some more

But the room was so crowded the glass overflowed

Then we went to sleep

And I fell from my innocent bed almost in time

To be caressed by a desirous Gregory Peck, you again,

Who used to be my mother's favorite actor,

"The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit"

(Continues...)

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Midwinter Day

9780811214063

0811214060

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