Half a Life's History

(Excerpted from The Jurassic Shales)


Scenario: An amnesiac wakes one morning
in London, England, in bed with two women. In the
process of recovering his memory, he goes back in
time 160 million years to the Jurassic geological
period to find his true original parents, the first
of the flying dinosaurs. The narrator is himself
a flying dinosaur, and The Jurassic Shales ends
with his being united with his father and mother.


Here I am writing to you
half a life's history
"A horse which throws the dreamer to the ground."
I am homesick and America has had a nervous breakdown.
I am taking shaman lessons and studying Karate.
My greatest complaint (you've offered to help) is amnesia.
Do you believe in transmigration of the soul? Yes, I do too.
But what if it can happen not only when one dies, but

several times in an afternoon?
And I'm sure it's not properly amnesia I am speaking of.
I go out of my body, I come back in.
I say amnesia because sometimes when this happens

I forget just who I am.
I've been doing this, I believe, with some regularity for

a quarter of a million years. I'm doing it more
and more frequently now because I'm unhappy.
Even the light depresses me. That is, the light
on Oxford Street, 6 PM on a Sunday. The light
in Bloom's. The light in Wimpy's. I haven't seen
light like this since the Middle Ages of the Animals.


We drink, we smoke, we go to parties. Friday night

we went to the dullest party in 3,000 years
in Bayswater off the Moscow Road.

I thought the whole time of algae, worms,

primitive brachiopods, molluscs, crustaceans,
I thought of my mother and those birds with the hollow

bones.

I am in the library at Swiss Cottage

eating chocolates in the children's room

What am I reading? Probably I have gone mad.
I am reading up on the eohippus, the first true

archaic horse.

I identify. Those horses were no larger than dogs.

I'm a dog and interested in horses

that were once my own size.
Why? I don't know why. Yes, I do. It's because

I feel I was once (also) a wooly rhinoceros.

That I am at this moment a wooly rhinoceros.
Anyway, I am no longer incapacitated by my erotic

fantasies.

I am devoting my whole attention to insects, geology, etc.
Each morning I have friends come in to read me my

biography and my passport
.
Then I know who I am. Then I can pay attention

to what needs to be done.


Who are these people anyway? They think they speak English,

but I don't understand a word they say.

My only reason for coming was to learn Karate with Kanazawa,

who has left for Germany.

Oh, I've just gone out of my body and now I'm back.
What is happening in America where, I am convinced,

in my previous existence, I was a Confederate
soldier killed in action, 186-?

Well, it doesn't matter. I'll find out soon enough and probably

know anyway if I'd only think about it.


Before I was born, my mother who is the Mother of fire,

gave birth to fire. Then to the Sabine women
and my sister.

My father, who has an upright tail, practices and earns his living

in Chicago. That he is a Rosicrucian and I am not

is no obstacle. We have made our peace, and increasingly--
I might say this is a love poem for my father. A love poem for

the seven maidens with the heads of snakes.

Half a life's history.


-Robert Sward

Copyright © 1995
All rights reserved.