Hilda Doolittle’s own ‘To Do List’ from her poems

 - write, write or die

- almonds, pecans, without salt, scatter them near some sand coast for a wind break

- endure

- stand apart, keep away

- decipher my own fate

- look up creuset, the crucible that I called a flat dish when I wrote [3]

I would enter your senses through burnt resin and pine-cones

- finish what I have begun

- emulate goodness

- choose, right, left, win, lose

- look up/find more on the Angels

- find Asmodele

- find my identity

- find a moment’s breathing-space

- recognize this unfathomable, dauntless separation,

this retreat from the world that yet holds the world,

in the mind’s closed recess

- scrape a small pine-cone from the sparse sea grass

- cherish my personal treasures

- sit here on my rock-throne not moving

or moving with everything

- be part of the lacquered sea grass

- track down Asmodele

- strike first

- light candles

- wait

- wait for a letter

- maintain the rose, the fire, the flame

- recover the human equation 

- stumble along, grope along, find my way

- draw my nun-grey about me

- find the Angel or the Power that rules this hour

- follow the voice

- look again to see if Aterchinis is spelt right

- clear the table

- pile the books on a chair

- open a window to the winter-air— close it again

- run a comb through our hair

- forget anxiety and terror for a brief fraction of your decade of the sphere

- spread the silken covers of our bed

- chart my way to the mysterious Melindais or the Zaflanians, find again

- hold a seashell to my ear

- make a thread, a strand of 72 angel’s names

- brush the carpet on the stairs

- look back to the night that’s past

- look forward to the night to come

- dive deep, dive deep, dive deeper

- laugh, laugh, like children


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