by Alice Notley
and attack the poor ones, with ancient future swords and lances, slings,
painintheass weaponry ones have none of. Qui busts out of the plâtre,
Moi je suis your warrior . . . Qui turns blood red, or red ocher, sword and knife
fighting beautiful figmentoids, all in frenzy of pigmented
limbs choreographed by mind, a group mind—Need thou to subdue them!
Can’t live with hierarchical figures even if painted and limned
artistic for olde eyes. We’re the ones thou shouldst desire, say the creatures.
Sick of it! says our Qui, screams almost soprano: won’t have it more.
Bwords flutter over, the last battle ever, ever they cheepeth—
Noeth, Qui screams fierce, pushing the painted back towards wall places.
What ever’s pastly still exists in chaos and can arise again.
Fight scene amuses the One, though, so stylized—so équipés, outfitted,
encrusted with stripèd kilts, belts for lotsa knives, tassels, kneepads,
feathered headdress upthrust—this guy has chicken face—Eagle! he screams
somehow hearing One’s mind. Why not hear it? One wants some privacy—
Oh walls can topple in mind as outside . . . Yew look like a chicken!
Yew have chicken eyes and yr beak’s wobbly! One shouts then thinks, Oh no
have joined fray, like any asshole. Meanwhile Qui presses on—
Back into the plaster with yr jackoffry!—whirlwind of Force, motion,
projection of the ones’, all the ones’ will. Artistic figures
can’t compete with the ones’ mental headbutt! push ’em all up, back in.
How tiresome! says Wideset. What’s the point of being comatose if
have to exert oneself? Parts one saith. Seal those bastards up now.
One of the wall ones, the winged coyote, ’s been friendly bien sûr . . .
But . . . One’s gonna fly upward away, says the winged coyote now.
Because, says the long-jawed black-nosed chien, It shouldn’t be this easy.
Easy? screameth Wideset, and before it can fly up, Wideset grabs
its pinions and drags coyote to ground of nowhere, the new ville—
Won’t put up with any more this crap! Stick this figment in the wall!
Shaker says, One likes its little wings—Let’s like them in the plaster . . .
There’s something one knows ones need to know, coyote says from flatness—
Won’t let one loose again to find out, Wideset says. One knows that,
Écoutez, nothing’s gonna happen, that’s what the ones need to know,
unless guys like wall ones are let loose. Know that, says One. Don’t want things
to happen. Never? Forever? One doesn’t, oh I don’t know,
Unbreasted’s reflecting on question . . . Wideset grabs Un by shoulders:
Go live in the wall, then, with them. But it’s too flat there! Listen, chump—
Chump?—Asshole, all right? Breasted seems poised to defend one: Don’t be crass . . .
Then One must heighten diction, says One. Ones are wearied of how long
a tumult hath any being endured. One experiences
déjà-vued layers speaking thusly: this worn fatigue of mischief—
motives, calumny, erotics of power, desire for jewels
that quash others with beauty historically imbued, talents
uninnocently deployed on arenaed stage to agitate,
and then nothing else: layer upon layer of plotting old wars
anew, as if this time fought’s the charm, the transcendent finality . . .
All so cheap and sexual, cricket calls in jars, but not as spontaneous . . .
mechanics of life like men defined. Ones are destroyed by, pastly,
this lack of invention—all the same; electronically
squared, umpteenthed—Don’t want it any more.—And if one wants it?—Breasted . . .
Not a democracy. One’ll insert the ones right into wall.
Breasted reflects in one’s most imbecile countenance, brows pulled
as thinking, scrunched together—mien learned in drama class for ever:
Does one take falseness into eternity, keep right on acting?
Recall, says Breasted, One’s pastly only a body—defined thus,
“woman” being that, no matter the accomplishment. Could change now?
rather than support that one’s kneejerkedness, kneejerkedly too?
Remember a dream: Walking blearily nude, pubic features blurred—
unregarded since old—along a margin of water, angry,
smoking a cigarette . . . all belongs to the other half of the ones . . .
Unbreasted’s urgent: Need to live in wall with the ones one’s most like—
hierarchical potentates and possible foes: Or be bored,
no friction, struggle for whatever’s defined as desirable.
Come with me, leap into this flat land and pretend it’s as of old!
Can’t resist, never cultivated will—Born Stunted. It’s over.
Breasted and Unbreasted soul suckers leap into wall on their own.
From the Anthology
and thou wert she
bitten by
mouth of be havior
so like an cestress
or unlike perhaps in choice
of hairstyle profession—wear tunics
to bureau indulge rules
of comportment ligaments tense to per-
form his necessary cognition
I was office poet read by the main women
desirous to change their desks
nest of immortal assistant
he’ll marry you in beauty
donate your thighs to his cause
Urgent Future Tense
which of us will Love help live
don’t be an innocent
let the more loving one be
was love the name of love
that wasn’t thus
he always wins every morning, I don’t know how
to tell you eros is his myth empowering
one’s not born .
XI
CITY OF NOTHING
Ones now leave them in walls. Walk on, says Qui, Past the restes of Future—
ones can disregard it, have been through it. L’Allée now passes through
mist, nothing but, though lit sometimes by shafts of the light invokèd
by words—mechanical, flat and painted. There’s really nothing here,
call it City of Nothing, says the One. How far does it extend?
“Far” doesn’t make sense here, Qui says, But beneath the ones’ feet appear—
See? are squares, are floating. Ones’re making them as ones walk along—
feet feet feet—palely hued. Is it a map? Is it that the ones can’t
exist without configuration, within or without of it—
one—ones—mind—it’s The Mind, that ones are of. Each, says Qui, One and all . . .
One as all or as one. Doing this together, without knowing . . .
feet feet feet, peach, white, beige . . . Look, there are words appearing in the squares,
disappearing before one can read them. Must be a way to hold
on to them, as if to remember them. Try to keep hold of them.
One is slid-ing in words, making the squares or rectangles: First it’s
snakelike s’s—see the those? ssss—then become words: Hold ’em!
Where? In mind ones’re in. Make ’em be fixed, ones’re in cont
rol, if
all that’s here je suis See? Whose foot’s that? France’s or Wideset’s—
Je Suis
I am
not she
both ones, of those ones, thought it at once, pink, how anomalous
anom
alous
the
uni
verse
Ones only make it once? make together, thinking this universe
alous
am
cryp-
to
Hidden, Je suis caché, One am the One, point making foot words
à chaque
point . . .
no
point
Yes that’s it, there’s no point.
pedes
Platonic
foot
fool Look, it says epithesma, brightness, O
can one just have that, such shimmering?
one
is
b
r
i
g
h
t
hovering goldenness?
Ones speak of it pastly, the lumen gone, now it’s internal, France
thou
the
dead
the
thou
the
dead
thou
says. Is the language? What? Whatever . . . Are the ones there yet?
thing
before
think
or
Tired of trying to be. Don’t want to read. Ones can sing it to you,
squares call out under foot, Had to make some thing diden cha.
Whoa whoa whoa, in the notes, where the song hides, decadent
deca
dent
inven-
tion.
Look, a whole poem at one’s foot, says the One. One has exuded it:
Poem
If One has left everything but a direct quotation from the soul,
how is it that that is still divided from the One in the grey day of this night?
Speak to me while I am unconscious:
Ancient harbor . . . I almost remember the worst of my dreams,
where the sails are nets. I am supposed to be stable, eternal but I grieve
where are my others when there are no survivors, on the shores of air?
I can’t find thee, you haven’t arrived, the flocks of white-winged
moths though I know you live for I do. There is no eternal solace—
only ever the one moment, and I am stable as the center of time, but
in my time I am its tone as well as its rock, fore’er in each e’er
oh, I am a translation as you’d hear. Seeking my true language
help me o dulce medicum, o heart words that are my blood,
understood only by me until now, until this haunted now.
One’s secret heart, is breaking one’s unsecret one, France says. Her foot:
Poème
Mon histoire, ignoble et tragique
comme le masque d’une femme oubliée
m’échappe. Aucun détail reste
du meurtre sauf ma connaissance
dans l’hôtel de ville, dans l’hôtel
des particules, des opales maux
Buveuse de l’opium de ma mort
je rêve d’une chambre sale et beige
Personne est là, mon corps est là
moi, je suis dehors en nulle part
Qui m’a tué? La drame des hommes
ou quelqu’un. C’est ton monde à toi
où les gens suivent les autres jusqu’àu
moment sanguinaire, ton vrai amour.
Because they have to have it that way, they—where there’s their own story.
If one remembers it’ll just be theirs, even if it’s in one’s head—
ghost head, what does one need dead—oh it goes on. Have to sing to past . . .
But ones aren’t all dead. Oh ones’re dead, if Terran nature’s dead.
Shaker says, Ones are contextless squiggles. Snakelike lines, Wideset says—
Not afraid to be that. Principle of rebirth: One’s a principle?
No, a wild, slithery line of force, cut. Cut from the linear
perception, when ones was somewhere but parenthetical
to l’histoire. Am a snake. Snakes beneath feet. Lines of magical force,
powerful effigy. Am I, is one. Words pour from mouth, perfect
because enacting one, in afterlife. Maybe it’s limbo here
or dark matter. It’s light, one means there’s no light but it’s light, or sight—
one continues to see. Let’s agree that the past’s undetailed shape,
let’s read these present poems underfoot, for they’re what ones are now.
Shaker reads ground beneath, almost stumbling, falling down on word slab:
Poem
Someone has a container containing a few pearls. Were eyeballs,
One must change again; feels a hardness against the past as it goes,
foot foot on the street of magenta thoughts abloom like witchy gorse . . .
And one is transformed, in a crystal momentary pull, pulled up
into a much larger thought, towering like Aldebaran, dear red—
One is as big and as forgetful as rocks. Speaking tourmalines,
beryl, plagioclase, hemimorphite, cinnabar, “Apache flame” agate;
lunar and solar eclipses; meteor showers; haloes of space dust . . .
Nothing will ever love one again. Struck by lightning, or icebound.
Everything’s happening backwards. One started here or always saw it:
I knew there was no way to portray me and I was left primordial.
One knows there is no way to portray one and one is left primordial—
But one is not left. One is articulate finally, articulated.
Is one no longer one who shook Wideset for whatever reason?
The new language can gain by that, beauty, humor, clarity.
Past motivation is of no importance. Shaker says. Not here—
Have been allowed to forget the details of one’s transgressions, now
internalized into materials, concrete, for existence—
“energy,” might say—one was a way, now one’s a transformed one,
what one is guilty of pastly, a tone, glint in grain of non-atmosphere.
I’m leaving you, me; I’ve left it all; can’t be in that thought again.
When something is over or someone. One emerges from the husk
that’s beige, featureless, or is that a simulacrum of my face
on straw, a portrait of some face stuff, as if there had been a face—
those gross species identificatory apertures one knew?
Those weren’t it, one’s it, and what one says: localizing for thee
a federation of singular traits, thoughtful, verbal—unjudged.
Another one’s underfoot, Shaker says. Must be thinking, quiet to me:
Poem
In this poem there’s nothing left but a shape and some microtones
I, one, am, is, the shadow within as the curlicued notes
the spiraling flinted sparks of tones word-set-off
wing round one’s purple-grey shoulder forms patching up existence
so I, one, can speak, sing, call to oneself watching it react, amused.
The far-hearing ear of my wideset-eyed
lover also distinguishes
these nuances of shadow longings, of unremembered torments of those histories
you were supposed to,
one was supposed to go through o mirage of the world in declension at the end of
the gorge of detailed spaces.
I walk into their gothic walls. I mean that I, one, dissolved into the brown-black
shifting texture
of this sound sounding disinterestedly justified or decreed.
On the other side of your wall I am taken apart, taken apart
abstractedly anguished in the language of costs—in this story, though,
one is never lost because one is a note, clear and inked-in black. Pedes, one is
calling to one’s feet. Take one further on. And on and one, adding or losing e
or eeeeee, screeches into bodhisattvahood. Forgetful of all but, vast,
the dimensions of the one most common note, maneuvering sunlike around.
on the other side of the wall I am taken apart, taken apart
And waltz with me to thy voice, Wideset says. Can one dance in this world—
oh later but not now. Is one in pair? Why bother now if one
doesn’t repopulate this space that way? Oh mind is one’s lover!
One’s never been in love, Wideset’s kid says. Will one not be like that?
But one remembers love. Love’s existing. It is what the ones are,
it is the same as to be—to be love—the ones are so social,
kill out of love, killing relational. Maybe chaos is love.
Thou’re too young to know, know to speak thus, Wideset says, and One says,
Differences between the ones are gone now. Only the ones, and what
ones are is in the air between, among, ones know all the same things,
same words and ones are still differently configured, ones are stars
each—same light—not same one. Not same at all. One’s name is One, the One,
since first ent’ring the glyph, embarked in ark, debarking into ville.
This is way that it is. Contain back together and rain sep’rate.
From Wideset’s kid’s right foot the following appears in rectangle:
Poem
One with no future speaks as one wishes after all
Shock of no childhood—do amoebas have one—but
know the new beings, les mots. One’s visage colors of the creepiest
