Dreaming the Shadow-Self
by Paula J. Lambert
When I dream the shadow-self
I wake with a whisper: Remember.
Houses, stairwells, basements and
sub-basements, labyrinths all divine.
Attics bright with light that isn’t there.
Neighborhoods familiar and unfamiliar.
Darkness. Doorways. Once, a lake:
I stood on the shore with a wolf,
watched a woman, lovely, nude, silver
as moonlight, walk into the water,
stopping so far away she should have
drowned. I saw the back of her head,
her hair, the full white moon. She was
the water, the moon. I am the woman,
the wolf, that silver light. I wake
with a word wrapped round my neck
like a scarf, like a whisper: remember.
IMAGE: “Woman with a Crescent Moon” by Paul Albert Besnard (1849-1934).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Paula J. Lambert is the author of The Sudden Seduction of Gravity (Full/Crescent Press, 2012) and The Guilt That Gathers (Pudding House, 2009). A residency artist for the Ohio Arts Council Arts Learning Program, she has published her work in numerous journals and anthologies. She is a past recipient of an OAC Individual Artist Fellowship and was a resident fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her MFA is from Bowling Green State University. Lambert currently resides in Dublin, Ohio, with her husband Michael Perkins, with whom she operates Full/Crescent Press, a small but growing independent publisher of poetry books and broadsides.
Silver Birch Press 