Half a Life's History
by Robert Sward

(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.

(from Robert Sward's Collected Poems 1957-2004,
due out next year from Black Moss Press)

© Robert Sward

P.S. There will be more from Robert in the next issue of Octavo.

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