‘The thing about you is never knowing’, my mother once said, ‘which way you're going to jump.’ My mother is no longer alive. She spent the last decade of her life with Alzheimer's (strange phrase), its sloping abyss or abyssal slope, so that when I now evoke her, or when she evocates or is evoked in me, I do not know whether I am hearing her voice in madness or in sanity, if in sanity is not insanity. I can be sure, you might suppose, that I am calling up within myself a voice of the dead. But nothing in truth is assured here, in the identity of this voice within me, whether coming from me or from the other in me, in the survival of that voice, in ‘the goodness’ (as Wallace Stevens calls it in ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’) of ‘lying in a maternal sound’, in the mother's ghost and the time of madness. As Stevens goes on to suggest, a few lines further on in the same poem: ‘In this identity, disembodiments / Still keep occurring’.