In a famous essay of the early seventies, "When We Dead Awaken," Adrienne Rich says "to the eye of a feminist, the work of Western male poets now writing reveals a deep fatalistic pessimism as to the possibilities of change, whether societal or personal. . . . The creative energy of patriarchy is running out fast; what remains is a self generating energy for destruction."

What a shame to have to agree with her. But it's hard to disagree, in this time of America of the Big Dick, Mr. America-I do-what-I want, America Dead-or-Alive Fraternity. As young men commanded by older ones slay and maim each other in Baghdad, the mind of man is proving itself again to be retarded, confined to a repertoire of brag, threat, and violence; addicted to scenarios (please, don't call them visions) of destruction, revenge, repetition. The men can't think of a new story.

To see it clearly is to weep for us, wretches sleepwalking in ignorance and suffering.

But indeed, how hard it is to see clearly, how hard to shake this infernal fog out of the head. Mostly, watching a story on television or radio, I am distressed by my own sense of unreality, my sense of being trapped inside a dream scripted by powers I am related to but not responsible for. Is this the condition of contemporary Americans, a sense of living underwater? And are we in some way responsible for the cultural imagine-nation? Why can't we think, why haven't we, thought of another story?

But maybe poetry can help, and maybe now is a good time to think about the poetic power of fantasy. In a time when the inherited imagination is unreal and insufficient, fantasy must rise to a level more real than the facts.

The Israeli poet Yehudi Amichai says, riffing on the Biblical aphorism:

After we beat the swords into ploughshares,
let us beat the ploughshares
into musical instruments.
That way, before they start a war,
they'll have to beat the musical instruments
back into ploughshares before they can beat them back into swords.

It is one job of fantasy in poetry to be Truer than fact, to be so real that it wakes us up and shows us a way through. To remind us of contexts larger than affliction and revenge, guilt and suffering. "Ah world" says Linda Gregg, "I love you with all my heart."

In her poem, "On the Occasion of Being Mistaken For a Man By a Woman" Stacey Waite models the way imagination can serve as a corrective lens for reality. In her poem, fantasy doesn't seem escapist; rather it rectifies the world and restores proportion.

When a woman does it, I feel more like a man.
Someone at the Wendy's drive-through makes me feel
more like a man when she says, "Out of ten, sir?"
and she leans her breasts atop the little shelf
at the folding window, smiles. "You have gorgeous hands,"
I say. I can't even see her hands, but it doesn't matter
because tonight I have license to compliment, to tell Simone
I have never seen more delicate hands.

In a perfect world,
I wouldn't tell Simone I was a "biological female"
until our 4th date. I would include this in the same sentence
that tells her my grandparents speak Slovak
and my brother is a restaurant owner. And Simone would sway in
and kiss my neck and say, "Really?, isn't that interesting?"
And over dinner with her parents, her father
would not forget to ask me about my brother,
about whether we could all go out for a free meal.

In a perfect world, Simone's voice is a cocoon,
an agent of transformation and Simone is a drive-thru queen
who gives us all permission to stop
dividing like cells, to stop making her leave me
on our 4th date and never speak another word about me.

The "perfect world" Waite's poem invokes is not a preposterous, cotton candy or sentimental fantasy, but a more sane and decent place, and her act of envisioning it makes it a plausible future.

If Waite's poem employs the healing power of fantasy in poetry, Randall Jarrell's poem, "A Sick Child," celebrates its innovative power. Like many of Jarrell's other poems, "A Sick Child" is cast in the voice of child. Jarrell affectionately parodies the child's flight of grandiosity. But then, also brilliantly, the child arrives at the predictable end of the selfish imagination.

A Sick Child

The postman comes while I am still in bed.
"Postman, I say, what do you have for me today?"
I say to him. (But really I'm in bed.)
Then he says -- what shall I have him say?

"This letter says that you are president
Of -- this word here; it's a republic."
Tell them I can't answer right away.
"It's your duty." No, I'd rather just be sick.

Then he tells me there are letters saying everything
That I can think of that I want for them to say.
I say, "Well, thank you very much. Good-bye."
He is ashamed and walks away.

If I can think of it, it isn't what I want.
I want. . . I want a ship from some near star
To land in the yard, and beings to come out
And think to me: "So this is where you are!"

Come." Except that they won't do,
I thought of them . . . And yet somewhere there must be
Something that's different from everything.
All that I've never thought of -- think of me!

This child speaker, with his strutting dreams of power and importance, his dreams of being sought and praised, of being an adult, resembles George W. Bush, or any of us -- but when Jarrell's marvelous child comes to the end of his abilities to conjure, he discovers he cannot endlessly gratify himself. Even the narcissistic self comes to hunger for something more nourishing than self- enclosure. In fact, in his breakthrough insight, the child recognizes that the universe is bigger than he is. He realizes that he needs help. And he asks to be invented anew.

It is a moment very like prayer with which the poem ends. For what is prayer but the acknowledgement of the profound limits of ego, and at the same time, an openness and receptivity to what lies outside the ego? The poem ends in listening. It is not that prayer is valuable because any particular god exists. It is valuable because it allows the self to stop telling the old story, and to acknowledge the dire need for vision. Dire indeed, and only those desperate can find the new way.