I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 68

by Mary MacLane

Late afternoon

To-morrow

LAST night as I slept I dreamed a vivid dream.

I dreamed it was late afternoon and I was locked in a condemned cell, sentenced to die. I would be led out and hanged on a gallows the following morning at day-break. I dreamed I sat beneath a narrow window in the cell through which shone the light of the waning afternoon. The light was very pale, as of sunshine long dead. I dreamed I held on my knees a small block of paper which had a half-inch blue border at the top to mark a perforation, and in my hand I had a red pencil. And I dreamed I had cheated the gallows and was writing a little ballad about it in sudden rhymes and rhythms quite alien to my waking forms. When I awoke the song was still beating time in my brain. And with my black awake-time pencil I wrote, except for two words, the rhyme, title and all, as I dreamed:

 

Late afternoon

They'll think when I pass through that doorTo-morrow in the dawn,I'll then be going to my death.It's I've already gone.

They'll watch me walk serenely out,Still-nerved and somber-eyed,'So strong,' they'll say, 'to meet her death.'To-day it is I died.

There'll be my pulses quick with life,My white sweet throat, my breath:But flesh and bone are all will hang.This noon I met my death.

For days I charmedly dwelt on death—I raved at death—I swore—Till vexédly death waived the date:And came this Day-Before.

From being lured with artful thoughtsMy life abortive grew.From being broached in livid moodMy death aborted too.

To-morrow they'll remark my calm—No fuss, no fright, no swoon.They'll kill a wench to-morrow dawnWas dead to-day at noon.

Three oddnesses are in that dream:

that it is true to life in that I in my lightning Mary-Mac-Lane-ness would manage to cheat a gallows.

that it is untrue to life in that instead of writing of it in the true twilit poetry of my own sufficient prose I wrote it in the shallow trick-phrasing of rhyme, a little serenade to the gibbet.

that it catches and holds my Shadow-self who lives not inside me but beside me: the resembling dissembling shadow I cast when I stand between the daylights of the actual world and the quivering films of the region of dreams.—

My owned mysteries thrive apace. They are poetry and beauty and loveliness yet they bruise and batter me and split me to atoms. Withal are terrifyingly superfluous: they violently kill the wench to-morrow dawn who died restfully to-day at noon.