Alice Notley

It was a poem men took because it said ovary didn’t take my political poems they took the one that said ovary Are you sure it was because it said ovary? Yes, for them that’s logical. --------------------------- Destroy another city What else is war for? So you’ll go down each of you does. dies in whirlwind each of you who does, dies paying for the pain you experience Just that and nothing is established Because I am a woman Cutting as many cords as tie you to me. this isn’t anarchy it isn’t anything you could name You’re still here without ties? because they were logical. --------------------------- Dance little asshole dance oh he gets elected, like a Calvinist He says, I have these guts Men, I have these guts. --------------------------- Having dedicated whole regions to the destruction you inspire, the logic will be to go on doing it doing it. Having proceeded by the logic of your per- sonal vaccuum you will perceive your continued lightlessness as an excuse to go on. having gone on as you have. And so one continues. ----------------------------- Lead the boy out of the building on fire his head twisted upwards all fucked What else is there to know if one has gotten twisted up all fucked he is a screaming fire ----------------------------- In the explanations of our lives’ experience they’ve left out this wild moment the long mirror on the right-hand wall of the corridor suddenly shattered I can’t see myself anymore. ----------------------------- I repeat that I am not frightened and why not I don’t know what my reactions are supposed to be. ----------------------------- “Please tell me something with which I’m familiar.” isn’t there another part of now

None of it’s there that you cared for, so familiar furniture and paintings. The medals aren’t there either I’m still there but it isn’t; I’m here; sword, I have sword — imagine — and disguising protect- ive the ancient helmet. Her head was cut off nonetheless. The man brought the head along to the doctor: the head said to. Shouldn’t we bring the body I asked in case he wants to re- attach them Oh, the head hadn’t thought of that. What do you have instead of a body, there? We have a wholeness of perception what we are asking you to do for us, write down our poems creates a body. Otherwise our body ... isn’t that we aren’t sensuous ... but we decohere, you must understand that the universe is always developing or changing its face — body — whatever; we have always been it but it’s never quite right ... pilot’s license; my pilot’s license is a fossil, you said. We need yours. We need your license. When Momma first, the very first hallucination that the decompression tube in her stomach was black ... It isn’t black I said over the phone well I thought it was she said, not being fanciful, and I was in a motel in Colorado at the time. Whose head was it really I repeat. For we never leave here and nothing fossilizes but stonelike mossy patterns might be made, colors transformed walk to the hospital, everyone’s mad at me, who cares? It was my whole soul transported and all its certainties that I existed, beneath all the legends, otherwise as joy.

So I'm an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach thing no song sing but in the word which I'm starlessly unreachably faithful you, pedant & you, politically righteous & you, alive you think you can peal my sober word apart from my drunken word my Buddhist word apart from my white sugar Thérèse word my word to comrade from my word to my mother but all my words are one word my lives one my last to first wound round in finally fiberless crystalline skein I began as a drunkard & ended as a child I began as an ordinary cruel lover & ended as a boy who read radiant newsprint I began physically embarrassing—"bloated"—& ended as a perfect black-haired laddy I began unnaturally subservient to my mother & ended in the crib of her goldenness I began in a fatal hemorrhage & ended in a tiny love's body perfect smallest one But I began in a word & I ended in a word & I know that word better Than any knows me or knows that word, probably, but I only asked to know it— That word is the word when I say me bloated & when I say me manly it's The word that word I write perfectly lovingly one & one after the other one But you—you can only take it when it's that one & not some other one Or you say "he lost it" as if I (I so nothinged) could ever lose the word But when there's only one word—when you know them, the words— The words are all only one word the perfect word— My body my alcohol my pain my death are only the perfect word as I Tell it to you, poor sweet categorizers Listen Every me I was & wrote were only & all (gently) That one perfect word

it would be that but only if I knew how again Could something like that get lost?    no only a little a little lost but if only I remember how I mean she or I oh a freight train goes by & they always do & did do I mean a real one too that I’m not on & am it very seriously in this serious love world that one where something oddly music will pass through your night and it will be me sweet me

The image wears large round glasses opaque blue bigger than her upper face I don’t know what she means. You image He stood there elected. In your eyes — he would escape from the auto parts store to come home and read. As I see him dead he has black hair and brown eyes he doesn’t have to wear glasses because he’s dead. I haven’t seen a desert lily in twenty years but knowing they exist thrills me. One year I went home and they were everywhere powerful, blooming to exist and in my eyes. As I could be that And I’ll always see it. Presidents are scum compared to desert lilies. Oh all right, Daddy says. The dead talk this way playing but they don’t need to write lines — this line of thought. I still don’t quite know what your poems are like. Immediate — but complex. Lily? As complex as that? As complex as us. We are seeing you ... As we speak and see, together, thinking it. Do the words relax you? We are them, reading. Being dead is like reading.

I the people to the things that are were & come to be. We were once what we know when we make love    When we go away from each other because we have been created at 10th & A, in winter & of trees & of the history of houses we hope we are notes of the musical scale of heaven—I the people so repetitious, & my vision of to hold the neighbors loose- ly here in light of gel, my gel, my vision come out of my eyes to hold you sur- round you in gold & you don’t know it ever. Everyone we the people having our vision of gold & silver & silken liquid light flowed from our eyes & caressing all around all the walls. I am a late Pre- in this dawn of We the people to the things that are & were & come to be Once what we knew was only and numbers became It is numbers & gold & at 10th & A you don’t have to know it ever. Opening words that show Opening words that show that we were once the first to recognize the immortality of numbered bodies. And we are the masters of hearing & saying at the double edge of body & breath We the lovers & the eyes All over, inside her when the wedding is over, & the Park “lies cold & lifeless” I the people, whatever is said by the first one along, Angel-Agate. I wear your colors I hear what we say & what we say . . . (and I the people am still parted in two & would cry)

Detective Hardwood looks like Batman this morning pouty cupidy mouth and a lot of black sculptural clanking the statuary in my mortuary, the Masonic Hall having burned again in dreams but everyone still keeps skipping towards it it's a hollow a round shell my life as the shape of the ways I've been fucked by prevailing thought & practice all the conscious and unconscious sexisms selfishnesses affluences assumptions suppressions in drift GET   RID   OF   ALL   CONTROLS—is what the Soul keeps screaming. ____________________ I look up someone grins you're a bloody feral wolf-face I like you. ____________________ I sleep-walked in a dream to a man's apartment— a man I'm doing business with— I forgot, but how could I? how I'd gotten there, and when I die will I remember all such forgotten things GET   RID   OF   THE   CONTROLS I want to remember now. I apologized to the man for not adhering to office hours it was four a.m. Office hours are better he said. Don't arrive anywhere in your sleep don't mix up night and day soul and detective. No. ____________________ There must be so much to reclaim because I'm so limited ____________________ this. They broke your day they fought it you forgot how advantageous to be fit with god and not see eye you forgot gold sun brilliant in this story go in conscious. ____________________ That queen that Assyrian woman was so cruel and that never occurred to her ... but those eyes saw raw smells and gods everywhere dusty this dust I was truly assembled from at least as you, we are communally such. If you say you'll hurt me, do you really mean me I can't be, can I, hurt? ____________________ “Hut Sut Tut Mut there's gonna be a wedding” I dream that's a song. Wake up with, in my head, “They say don't go on Wolverton Moun-tain” (“Her tender lips/are sweeter than hone-y” ____________________ Later. I have a drop of blood on a front tooth I kind of don't mind— This the list of what we've done: It was different structure we killed it put beasts in the refrigerator and that was almost as bad as my own enslavement. Then I saw Christ's blood pumped into a rejuvenating mummy. This great sickness we're part of apple clot and can you really chew it detective Oh sure I can, I'm Robert Mitch-ham. ____________________ you've broke your own sto I'm sort of hysterical the E is it for hope, cutting the E might be for Hope Nope and bloody, the bloodiest is Hope. Where are the E's of exactness? E is my middle name

Toys and rose               The zoo body zigzags I think fish too but I'm a polite social being, I'm a Ladle Lady or purple and blue I write green letters and gold editorials for the Krystal Oxygen Company I have one hip as far as I can see, that I see as I write say white tee-shirts upsidedown turn em around & put them on your muscles my angels or a semi-colon is blue window to me is that a haiku? I fly over San Diego in some one or another real despair and ask you to comfort me. You more or less do, you aren't even here my best me my worldly me my taste of spring my continuance my comfort will you comfort me? I offer you my heart over Tucson I can't use it take it to comfort me free me be it take it take it to be it which apparently you don't or take you help provide me it I think, that happens among true people, that poem I was writing no good poem but Moment framed the Pleiades The garnets ring more beautiful the longer you are waiting for me in them, where Deity makes me friendly there. But who put on all the tee-shirts in Hunter's Point? Well we're all good boys my son said so. A semi-colon is a semi-precious garnet cluster telegram; what we love are such depths between all the messages. Pass the salt; Ladies of the Tang, bubble of night; this book about Harry Truman is wonderful. I see the Gulf Moon Rising every night. I'm familiar with the zonked starfish. I've the sheen on under the fire-escape railing all streetlight-lit. The hollow suddenly appeared to enlarge and fill with a bright light. Wild with the taste of wine it does not remember the despair of an hour ago, which was true that is of a true woman. She was somehow hating her position on the round earth in the dusky sky on a harsh Sunday. On the ground forgotten flowerlike firmaments. She addressed in uneloquent hatred SMUG LIFE the one who soothes one's foolishness the Great Face Construct who loves you for your kinks child anyway, the Guru God: Oh I will come back a knockout tomorrow Useless to you! You're not it you smug face I'm not doing your yoga not wearing Your moondrops using your cream Rinse letting you fuck me Exquisite Like I was one of the Ones With Brains Too! Intelligence in panties with peekaboo holes— No I'm coming back raw I'm getting drenched in the rain It's rain and it's wet I'm soaked I'm Chilled and I'm coughing the air's raw To my throat, which is raw from Coughing, coughing so strong Coughing and laughing So strong from killing you! Etc. She didn't kill nothing. & I don't get to share no secrets with the stars. I make chow. I contemplate semi-colons. I despair as a mother. I scream at that kid I'm gonna crack open your big walnut if you don't go to sleep. Theories of grace, that it implies no surprise no shock. Ukrainians sudden on Sunday speaking Ukrainian, the cross not Christian but Gracious and when I want to cry or cough violently it must diffuse back into my embassy; hard, that takes hard. And if it weren't for you . . . not you smug life face, but real you. Please play cribbage. Pass the salt. Think of a garnet-black cabbage, a Ukrainian is selling it on 7th Street in honor of our marriage. A Spanish fan opens in my abdomen I have Spanish dancers in my stomach they're my arching striving in dance where it's black red flowers darken to be huge pleasuring the severe, tried Angel who meets transition, transport, as abruptly as necessary for everyone's are apt Says the Unassuming Graceful Whose down-hip-ness Is that window The dancers' sensuous flaw That admits Spring, Contingent upon our personality Spring is for the worldly just like the HaHa Room Just like dearest rockbottom suddenly gone buoyant To be black geese to be strenuous dancers is not to dignify a passion but to grip it. Not saints but always pupils pupils dilated fully black in full achievement of gut-feeling. Joy.

my name is Alice Elizabeth, so am I Allie Sheedy of the movie Short Circuits thus angry or Elizabeth McGovern self-controlled? This question is posited on a television screen where I can't quite identify the actress shown—which is she? I am Allie and I will continue to rant. ____________________ My voice rises in real life often— because I am 'passionate' ... that's a convenient word. ____________________ I'm still in the forest, darkening wishing I were 'nicer.' Hardwood says, You should stand up soon I'll help you I say, I have cramps I say, I'm using my period, to get pissed off and to Know. ____________________ I dreamed, last night, about an immense Dead Seal below the surface of the water in a harbor pull the curtain down. For months you would not break the spell for eternities you have not done so, citing economic exigencies; the whole thing is a mess. I might rather be dead than doing what it takes to keep the seal under water whale-sized E is for seal. For spell. For suppression. ____________________ To take part in you is to die is why one dies Have I said this before? ____________________ I am Alp the Dizzy. ____________________ The dead seal isn't a person, it's poetry the seal the hallmark of selfhood, dead grotesquely large and richly hardening. "Hardwood it was someone like you you drowned the seal" "No I'm making both you and it 'hard.' " ____________________ And I'm still in the forest. ____________________ And I'm still in the forest Money's more the real live poetry abstract symbolic imaginary trade your life for it and trade it for your life so you'll have something 'to do' Sink the whale and sleep all day in the real world, up and functioning more fully imagined and dreamed, in society's than in your own, imagination? I'm standing I'm standing up Hard I keep being Hardwood myself, dark and hard. ____________________ Initiating a new 'broken symmetry' (spinning to the Left, like a newborn neutrino) so that we can have a new consciousness ... am I doing that? Yes I think so. ____________________ The forest contains a French restaurant every meter or so ... difficult to fast in this dream vision. We're a very unpopular group today We've shot off another great bomb and we've shot down a terrorist, an Arab, young, before we even found out what he "knew." ____________________ Tell me something beautiful, bitter because we are somehow bitter, forever, a taste included in origin, in love, in you. So I don't have to be cloyed. ... soul's waters are reticent sly swamps. It had nothing in it, that swamp; because I didn't know how to look for the parts of its obvious whole—death is minute, flavorful parts—which are said to spin as I'm said to walk, moving while else mostly unconscious of that. ____________________ In the new consciousness

The Goddess who created this passing world Said Let there be lightbulbs & liquefaction Life spilled out onto the street, colors whirled Cars & the variously shod feet were born And the past & future & I born too Light as airmail paper away she flew To Annapurna or Mt. McKinley Or both but instantly Clarified, composed, forever was I Meant by her to recognize a painting As beautiful or a movie stunning And to adore the finitude of words And understand as surfaces my dreams Know the eye the organ of affection And depths to be inflections Of her voice & wrist & smile