<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.



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