I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus

I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown under an arcade. // I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers / and those powers severely limited / by authorities whose faces I rarely see. / I am a woman in the prime of life / driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce / through a landscape of twilight and thorns. / a woman with a certain mission / which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact. / A woman with the nerves of a panther / a woman with contacts among Hell"s Angels / a woman feeling the fulness of her powers / At the precise moment when she must not use them / a woman sworn to lucidity / who sees through the mayhem, the smoky fires / of these under ground streets / her dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind / on the wrong side of the mirror.