by Alice Notley
He just has to have a chance to be in The Hall of Fame!”
All pleased rise
Cleansed
Pure
In perfect order go.
Paciorek
FOR ANSELM HOLLO
Light takes the bat, &
shoulder; who can tell us
how? (I wake to sleep, &
take my waking fast). O lowly
worm, falling down upstairs,
& down is a lowly thing, how
fast is no longer a joy?
9:16 & 2:44, & 25 Minutes to 5
Dear Management’s beautiful daughters,
sweetly
made Marion, & Alice, the Elephant—
the
trouble with you two is just happened for
the first time ever, which is once more than
I can hold my head up under ever after again—If
Anybody asks you who made up this song, just tell ’em
It was me, & I’ve done been here & gone.
My Life & Love
FOR PHIL WHALEN
“Do you
think I’ll
ever see
him again?
“Beauty
whose action is
no stronger than a
flower?
“I think I’m about to be
surpassed again.
“Do you think we’d better go to
California?”
“Naw. Don’t be silly. Send him a round
cheese or something. A can
of peaches.”
Hello, Sunshine,
Take off your head; unloose
the duck; lift up your
heart, and quack! I am the
Morning Glory, I take no
back talk. . . .
Take me twice each morning;
be funny that way.
In Morton’s Grille
In Morton’s Grille I
always get nostalgia for Morton’s Grille
which wasn’t called Morton’s Grille
at all, but THE RIVIERA CAFE, way out on
Elmwood Avenue. They had a machine,
this was before TV, you put a quarter in
& a zany 3 minute movie of the Hatfields
shooting at the McCoys out a log cabin
window came on; the McCoys ran out of
bullets, so they started singing, “Pass the
Biscuits, Mirandy!” Grandma’s biscuits were
so hard, terrible, but saved the day when thrown
at the real McCoys.
St. Mark’s in the Bouwerie
FOR HARRIS SCHIFF
Naked
with a lion
a small lesbian
smoking a pipe
some silent young men
“Shit!” they exclaim
“Fuck all women!”
They all start singing patriotic songs
Dinner at George & Katie Schneeman’s
She was pretty swacked by the time she
Put the spaghetti & meatballs into the orgy pasta
bowl—There was mixed salt & pepper in the
“Tittie-tweak” pasta bowl—We drank some dago red
from glazed girlie demi-tasse cups—after
which we engaged in heterosexual intercourse, mutual
masturbation, fellatio, & cunnilingus. For
dessert we stared at a cupboard full of art critic
friends, sgraffitoed into underglazes on vases. We did
have a very nice time.
Listen, Old Friend
“This ability, to do things well,
and to do them with precision & with
modesty, is nothing but plain & simple
Vanity.
“It is Pride overfertilizes the soil
till alone the blue rose, grow—I know
Dante Alighieri told me so.”
(signed:)
THE SLOTH
Dinosaur Love
FOR ANNE & REED
Anne Lesley Waldman says, No Fossil Fuels
The best of the free times are still yet to come
With all of our running & all of our coming if we
Couldn’t laugh we’d both go insane—with changes
of attitudes
At the Horse Latitudes—if we couldn’t laugh, we’d
All be insane—
but right here with you, the living seems true, &
the gods are not burning us just to keep warm.
Spell
A sparrow whispers in my loins
Geranium plus Geronimo forever
Across the wide Missouri
We drive us.
For Robt. Creeley
“In My Green Age”
like they say,
much compassion,
little dismay,
such exuberance—
Loving: Caught: Back:
There’s a place—
“tho are be were as now is now. . . .”
Fine Mothers
With sound Sun melts snow
Elms fill in
and wind blows green. (“When the wind
was green” . . . ) This is the Spring I knew
would come.
The rosy finches row through.
day moves then, my room— lightnights
bat their yellow dust against
the windows, & I dream I am black
running, rising, to the sea:
Evenings, night heroes stop here, or,
gently pass
The trees release into sky.
Travelling by,
from grove to Mars,
SEVEN arc over.
I call them angels. O, angels,
O, common & amazing.
Pandora’s Box, an Ode
. . . was 30 when we met. I was
21. & yet he gave me the impression
he was vitally interested in what I
was doing & what was inside me! One
was Tremendous Power over all friends.
Power to make them do whatever. Wed. Bed.
Dig the streets. Two is speeding and pills
to beef up on on top of speeding ills. Three,
assumptions. Four, flattery. Five, highly
articulate streets, & when he saw me I was witty.
I was good poetry. Love was all I was. As
the case is, he had or was a charm
of his own. I had the unmistakable signature
of a mean spirit. Very close to breaking in.
I was like Allen Ginsberg’s face, Jack’s face,
eye to eye on me. Face of Allen. Face of Kerouac.
It was all in California. Now,
all of my kingdoms are here.
To Book-Keepers
The Final Chapters
of the History
of
Modernism are
going to be written
in blood. Yours,
you poor Immigrants!
The School Windows Song
AFTER VACHEL LINDSAY
High School windows are always broken;
Somebody’s always throwing rocks,
Somebody always throws a stone,
Playing ugly playing tricks.
Jr. High windows are always broken, too:
There are plenty of other windows that never
get broken;
No one’s going into Midtown & throwing rocks
At & through big, Midtown, store-windows.
Even the Grade School windows are always
Broken: where the little kids go to school.
Something is already long past terribly wrong.
End of The Public-School Windows Song.
Transition of Nothing Noted as Fascinating
The Chinese ate their roots; it
made them puke. We don’t know til
we see our own. You are irresistible.
It makes me blush. How you
se
e yourself is my politics. O Turkey,
Resonance in me that didn’t even want to know
what it was, still there, don’t ever make jokes
about reality in Berkeley, they don’t
understand either one there.
Donald Allen, Donald Keene, Wm. “Ted” deBary,
it’s hard to respect oneself,
but I would like to be free.
China Night. Cry of cuckoo. Chinese moon.
Whoa Back Buck & Gee By Land!
FOR WYSTAN AUDEN, &
THELONIOUS SPHERE MONK
This night my soul, & yr soul, will be wrapped in
the same dark shroud
While whole days go by and later their years;
Sleep, Big Baby, sleep your fill
With those daimones of Earth, the Erinyes,
Women in the night who moan yr name.
“Man, that was Leadbelly!”
Frances
Now that I
With you
Since
Leaving
Each day seems
The night
Tired with
Languisht
Suffering
While you
Nor I
With that
I feel.
Sweet Iris
Take these beads from my shoulders
There’s your paintings on the walls
Turn around slow & slowly
Help me make it through the night
Then I’ll take you out for breakfast
Never see you all my life
I Dreamt I See Three Ladies in a Tree
FOR DOUGLAS OLIVER, DENISE RILEY, & WENDY MULFORD
If someone doesn’t help me soon I
believe I’m going to lose my mind, I
mean my tone of voice, my first clue
as to what this speaker is like. Help! (he).
is a beautiful piece of work in that it
has to spill out & still stand as
meeting own requirements: dedicated to Betty
Chapman of Coon, Minnesota: take me deeper
via from the outside, you, my unforgettables, my
best. Hand, 2 hands, wheel, & blood; O broken-hearted
Mystery that used to sing to me: now I’m too misty,
and too much in love. O lovely line that doesn’t give an
inch, but gives.
Moat Trouble
He was wounded & so
was having
Moat Trouble.
Hollywood
paid Lillian Gish $800,000 to
disappear so lovely so pure like milk
seems but isn’t because of the fall-out
but it would have only cost me five & didn’t,
so I did, but when Garbo is the temptress
doesn’t it seem absolutely perfectly
right? just being there? nothing
costs anything that’s something, does it?
like soaking at a Rosenthal / Ceravolo Poetry Reading
or blazing while “The White Snake” unfolds
itself: in the city, there one feels free, while
in the country, Peace, it’s wonderful, & worrisome
I’ve never seen a peaceful demonstration, have you?
NO MORE NUKES
Last Poem
FOR TOM PICKARD
I am the man yr father & Mum was
When you were just a wee insolent tyke
until at 5 o’clock in the afternoon
on one of the days of infamy, & there
were many, & more to come yet, the goons
& the scabs of Management set upon us
Jarrow boys, & left us broken, confused
and alone in the ensuing brouhaha. They
outnumbered us 5 to 1; & each had club
knife or gun. Kill them, kill them, my
sons. Kill their sons.
Mutiny!
The Admirals brushed
the dandruff off their
epaulets and steamed
on the H. M. S. Hesper
toward Argentina. I
like doggies on their “little
feet”, don’t you, I said, but
they kept rolling over, beneath
the tracer bullets and
the Antarctic moon, beneath the
daunting missiles and the Prince
in his helicopter, they were
steaming toward interesting places,
to meet interesting people, and
kill them. They were at sea,
and it was also beneath them.
Jo-Mama
The St. Mark’s Poetry Project
is closed for the summer. But
all over the world, poets
are writing poems. Why?
Montezuma’s Revenge
In order to make friends with the natives
In my home town, I let them cut off my face
By the shores of Lake Butter, on
The 7th anniversary of their arrival
In our Utopia. It was the First of May.
Nose-less, eye-less, speechless, and
With no ears, I understood their reasoning,
And will spend the rest of my days
helping them cover their asses. Free.
Turk
FOR ERJE AYDEN
“There’s no place
to go
my heart,
for all your
100,000
words.”
M’Sieur & Madame Butterfly
I go on loving you
Like water Yggdrasil
Where you are 100,000 flowers
bloom while across the
broken eggshell field the ink
rises from the fossils, as my
tongue drifts lightly into the Gobi Desert of yr
ear & we become a person’s lungs & take to the air.
Wantonesse
Heart of my heart
Fair, & enjoyable
Harmlessly spooky
Loving her back
Creature
FOR ALICE NOTLEY
Before I was alive
I were a long, dark, continent
Lonely from the beginning of time
Behind Midnight’s screen on St. Mark’s Place
And my thin, black, rage
Did envelop my pale, dusty, willowy-green-
Shell in dark bricks & black concrete
’til I was a Hell that was not fire, but only hot.
Then I called you to bring me
One more drink, & your good legs
And translucent heart brought me
A city, which I put on, & became
Glad, & I walked toward Marion’s &
Helena’s, to be seen, & found beautiful,
And was, & I came alive, & I cried Love!
XIII
(AFTER JACK KEROUAC)
O Will Hubbard in the night! A great writer today he is,
he is a shadow hovering over Western Literature, and
no great writer ever lived without that soft and
tender curiosity, verging on maternal care, about what
others say & think, (think & say), no great writer
ever packed off from this scene on earth without
amazement like the amazement he felt because
I was myself.
Providence
Lefty Cahir, loan me your football shoes again—
Clark, let me borrow the brown suit once more—
I hear a fluttering against my windows.
River, don’t rise above the 3rd floor.
Paris, Frances
I tried to put the coffee back together
For I knew I would not be able to raise the fine
Lady who sits wrapped in her amber shawl
Mrs. of everything that’s mine right now, an interior
Noon smokes in its streets, as useless as
Mein host’s London Fog, and bl
ack umbrella, & these pills
Is it Easter? Did we go? All around the purple heather?
Go fly! my dears. Go fly! I’m in the weather.
Windshield
There is no windshield.
Stars & Stripes Forever
FOR DICK JEROME
How terrible a life is
And you’re crazy all the time
Because the words don’t fit
The heart isn’t breakable
And it has a lot of dirt on it
The white stuff doesn’t clean it & it can’t
be written on
Black doesn’t go anywhere
Except away & there isn’t any
Just a body very wet & chemistry
which can explode like salt & snow
& does so, often.
Minnesota
If I didn’t feel so
bad, I’d feel so good!
I Heard Brew Moore Say, One Day
FOR ALLEN GINSBERG
Go in Manhattan,
Suffer Death’s dream Armies in battle!
Wake me up naked:
Solomon’s Temple The Pyramids & Sphinx sent me here!
The tent flapped happily spacious & didn’t fall down—
Mts. rising over the white lake 6 a.m.—mist drifting
between water & sky—
Middle-aged & huge of frame, Martian, dim, nevertheless I
flew from bunk
into shoe of brown & sock of blue, up into shining morning
light, by suns,
landed, & walked outside me, & the bomb’d dropped
all over the Lower East Side! What new element
Now borne in Nature?, I cried. If I had heart attack now
Am I ready to face my mother? What do? Whither go?
How choose now?, I cried. And, Go in Manhattan, Brew Moore
