The looking-glass River, the Land of Counterpane. I don’t know why that smarmy Hillary ad with the sleeping children brought me here, but the thing has been ticking away in my brain for days reminding me of something, and this afternoon I found it- in “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” by Robert Louis Stevenson. The 1929 edition I’m holding in my hands this afternoon would be really valuable if I hadn’t drawn in it when I was five years old. “You have curious things to eat,” the ditty called Foreign Children burbles, “I am fed on proper meat.” This quaint and deeply racist little book does evoke Herself in her Shiva aspect, Hillary telling the other girls and boys not to meddle with her toys. There is something so dim, prim and passé in her red phone ad.

At work we all argue about it, and all the fussing is about style over substance. I want to know why she’s in a grim suit and has taken so damned long to answer the phone. “If she’s already so badly dressed she should get it on the first ring,” I tell Richard. “Shouldn’t she be in her jammies tucked next to Bill anyway?” He laughs out loud. “You have to be kidding,” he says. “In the bed with Bill? How could that ever happen?”

When the day shift arrives we all commingle our election anxieties, agree to sell our houses when Hillary catapults McCain into the Oval Office. We decide to buy a farm in Umbria and start a commune, something I was too young to experience in the sixties and still long to know up close. I’ll spit shine that little stone villa, see if I don’t.

“The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp, the shadow of the child that goes to bed – all the wicked shadows coming, tramp, tramp, tramp, with the black night overhead.” Better the black night than the White Goddess. She scares me more than the black night, and Johnny the Coot scares me more than the Bogeyman inside that darkness. Barack saluted the “young at heart” last night in a brilliant simple phrase, rebuking Bill while evoking the first line of that old song: “Fairytales can come true, it can happen to you,” and I am struck again by the man’s mojo, for while Hillary is fusty as an old mummy (sorry, Sylvia!) Obama can make the dead stuff rise again fresh as a daisy. Let Barack make us a world of wonderful words and dispel the shadows.