Requiem for the First Half of Split Poem by Alice Notley

An early sadness for the future
(as in dreams of myself young and sad)
accompanies my departure towards
a conventional story: a town
of girls a New York City dormitory.
And so a trail proceeds from
our house on the top of the hill
down the back way of former army barracks
and past the borrowed church (ours had no tank)
where I was baptized
reasoning "it must be true" out of
the love I had for my mother.
And Tony's house there across the street from it
absolutely in the Mexican gully
in dreams of which he and I still fight armed enemies
he stepped on a land mine in Nam
when I remind my brother, twenty years after
his face contorts he knows the look of that death
a week before he himself dies
blood-tinged ruddy-winged, but that's another
dream-site the Needles Cemetery inelegant
unbeautiful and dear and dry.
See how many loves, how much thus sadness
in the future begins to
haunt that walk down that hill
towards the highway away to the dormitory
as I go to New York to sever love's connections
and make the "real ones" generated by
actual mating by beauty and clothes
the black wool suit with its three button jacket
the oddly puffed-sleeved orange sweater
and an orange and midnight-
blue paisley waistless dress.
New trail there,
Brett knows my future love though I don't
hitchhikes with him to California
years before I catch up to the poets in Iowa City
that will be in '69, my brother
hasn't yet signed up for Nam then
when he gives me rattles off a rattler
which I keep in my wooden India box I still have
until they stink.
I can't keep track of the track there's nothing but
sidetrails of love and sadness so love is
all that makes my people act they go to war for love
you know, of who and what you are
like I was baptized by
the cruellest-lipped prissiest-mouthed man in the world
for love, but I could just have gone swimming
walked back up love's hill
back up at the house you can get to the pool
barefoot if you can find enough
bush or telephone-pole shadows.
We'd all swim together
I'd tread water dreaming of the future
but a wilder larger eye birdlike
distant holds the pool in its pupil
anyone's that too, and hold the enlarging
water sad how not be
why don't the smart girls in New York know this
why don't you or I know what we know
the eye and the water both enlarge still why don't
smart girls in Paris, yes larger but will never flood
the containing eye, but why not
and sometimes it does
when you or your own are the news.