Calved, set adrift, sea-girt,
whether (to name each landmass)
dominant Gena or submissive Peg; sultry Page;
mousy Anne, or even surprisingly Egan,
the little boy in this choir of multiples (although he too
is equally damaged and sings off-key);
under a combination of drugs
and years of psychotherapy,
all the lost continents,
having fractured along faultlines
during an all too seismic
childhood,
begin to uproot themselves, to gather strength
for the trip back out of separation,
reversing the diaspora.
First to achieve substantiality, rising to the surface
like Atlantis reborn, is her core personality,
the black mass of the world she was at age eleven,
when everything fractured.
Puzzle-fitted back into the whole
and eventually assuming authority
over the rest, it's she who now asserts
tectonic control over her various selves.
The result is geopristine—
as if the original skull of the Earth has
reintegrated itself,
its verdant bones no longer separated
by blue chasms of guilt
and self-loathing.
("You made me do what I did," says the message
she finds in the bottle, sent to her by black currents
from the prison beyond the headlands. "No, I didn't,"
counters her healed brain now, echoing the gulls.)
Sutured whole,
the fontanels of who-she-was-before-
the-split fuse together seamlessly,
united once more.
Alone again Pangea rules, and is herself.