With a Worsened Left Eye I Still Find Street Lamps Crooked

THE GODDESS WHO CREATED THE PASSING WORLD

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

Ouch, two of my heroes gone within a month. I never did play a My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game with poets though if I did she would have owned one of three permanent spots (John Ashbery and James Tate, the only two poets with more poems posted here than Notley, and no one is even within shouting distance of those three). I wish I'd met her
RIP Alice Notley				RIP Alice Notley
Alice Notley: the Paris Review interview
Alice Notley's prophecies					Notley 101
Alice Notley and the Art of Not Giving a Damn

I SUPPOSE THIS IS ALL A LEFTHAND PLOT

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

*

SOULS ON METRO No one could stand it the métro was so slow later halted a man started
Strumming a guitar making patter I couldn’t hear how could
There be room for a guitar I should be like him tell you things I’m
Shy tried remembering a dream of a language of spontaneous irregular spirals
Did I even see anyone our ridiculous eyes I remember when my vision started to
xxxxxx blur at age six
I thought I was effecting this change deliberately I still wonder
Why would I have done that pushing mentally at my eyes as they worsened
Maybe they hadn’t seen right was I asking them to see more not less
The new sight would be subtly different as you joined with what you saw
My sight blurred more I felt my way more and with glasses then contacts read
xxxxxx constantly
When I was in my thirties my retina detached I began to see street lamps as crooked
We didn’t have any money then I wasn’t examined for three weeks
Waiting for the street lamps to straighten up why not
After the surgery in the hospital I gathered my wits to go on seeing
With a worsened left eye I still find street lamps crooked
I don’t know what’s really out there I’m still working on how to see
I’m tired of having separate senses though or of the idea of senses
I wasn’t really looking this morning in the métro adorable Jewish child
Alone glasses and Orthodox hat dark coat bewildered by the train’s refusal
Ladies in skirts and weirdly toed stilettos I’m always looking at the feet
Greying men wearing dignity the train wouldn’t run for them though we all saw it the same
xxxxxx way it wasn’t working
It’s just a train you’d say ephemeral I’d say I’d say souls riding nothing much
In no real clothes blurs on their way to some imagined location anyway

*

LICENSE

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.