<notley's "point of fidelity">
2002-04-23.10:23 p.m.
Point of Fidelity Alice Notley Taking a large bloody napkin upstairs Then eat a blue heart-shaped valium with a red dot on it Why can't I live as I say barren wilderness beauty I say? offer a right poverty sitting near my sandals throw away these feelings I'm so ����easily tricked by poems of smallness I'm so easily, others' ����easy reception of a heart-mind a simulacrum Took the bloody napkin upstairs then took a blue heart tranq What's the name of the larger island? Why am I still on the smaller one? I'm not a story or life: if I say that, I'm suddenly here terror in this real poem Bring the bloody napkin upstairs Don't take the blue heart tranq A great thing is of no importance Hooked, and tricked, like a criminal on greatness, a flourish a sound of a fiction What is the true name it's I not 'so she' 'so she' Face the air and say I Go past tears don't be 'moved' _______ There's catastrophe, a poem "I keep seeing all those bodies" Wrench back from a fiction The bodies are really there then Catastophe is in the real poem Took the blue kotex upstairs Took the bloody tranq swallowed the heart so I wouldn't have to be "I keep seeing all those bodies" Who am I responsible to? A self, precisely, and "all those bodies" Don't dance on the bodies "What does she think she's doing asking me to dance with her on his grave?" I remember saying that once: to accuse of the wish to dance is almost to dance, to dance on the mechanistic wrongdoer mechanistic oneself, as if a character in some stupid novel, perpetually, daily reserving my real self for a confrontation in the future And so face it now face it what I am, infinite and "all those bodies" Flashback to a consecrated time a proper instance in a wilderness: ��������POEM ����This death is Egyptian ����I wear an Egyptian dress ����with black horizontal stripes ����you even say "your dress is Egyptian" ����when I perform your last rites ����sprinkling you with drops of gin & tonic ����and saying, "May the 14 pieces ����of Osiris be joined together" ����We laugh though you'll die the next day ����Eleven years later I wonder ����at using such a fiction, a fetish of Egyptian ����exactly to be there, that moment. Things we do together can be ����true, actions true "I keep seeing all those bodies" Take the bloody napkin upstairs Open the pupil, tranq-less in terror hollowware hollowware filled with self ������������Living is a poem, ask an animal What else is it doing there, sifting genes? I take the bloody kotex upstairs I don't have to put it in my trash you trash will do too.
back /& forth /& frosting
names are often sad