running
judgment
a million literal years of.
I’m sick of judging your carnage,
she says,
you are all left alone
with it.
Dido’s job
for two thousand years
has been to
commit suicide
after
her death, and after
the Romans destroy her
foundation.
The witch’s job. is to change
time
which runs in short lines
between
events like innumerable
falls of cities
is watching me. But it isn’t.
If you change the nature of
events
do you change time?
Event: I sat down to
talk to everyone
who had ever lived.
‘My country
is broken and it can’t be fixed’
time loved so
femina-hating Rome
always falling
I, the witch, pardon no one
instead, I change Dido’s job.
Man with whom everything is
boring
everything he does and that one
does with him
is boring. One is condemned
to be part of his
boring world.
There is another man
with whom one’s condemned
to be
duplicitous
Everything’s a cheat a scam
in the big-guy road-house world
Help him tell lies. wear special
clothes
for that.
THIS WAS HOW I BROKE IT
They told me I couldn’t have
it—time—so
I took it.
I put him
away
who had withered to a doll.
We ghouls waiting outside of time. . .
Dido to poem: Do all my remembering
now
so city continues.
Do we accept it says voice
He became too old to be wise; we
had to step outside him
and into knowledge
of poetry, the ghoulish, timeless state.
This poem, the poem,
always
my real country
About the Author
Alice Notley is the author of over thirty collections of poems, including the now classic epic The Descent of Alette (1996), Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970–2005 (Wesleyan, 2006), Reason and Other Women (2010), and Culture of One (2011). She is the recipient of the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize. For many years she has lived and written in Paris, France.
Songs and Stories of the Ghouls Page 14
