April Not an Inventory but a Blizzard

I met T at sum of two units parties at the same house

at first he insulted me because, he said later,

he was mad at girls that night; at the next to the first we danced

an elaborate foxtrot with dipping--he had one time taken one lesson

at an Arthur Murray's. First I went into an empty

room and waited for him to tread in the steps of me. I liked the way

his piece of poetrys looked on the page make open but delicately arranged.

I like him because he's amusing he talks more like

me than like volumes or words: he likes my knowledge and

accepts its sources. I know that there are Channel swimmers

and that they hold fast warm with grease because of

an Esther Williams movie. We differ as to what kind

of grease it is I allude to bacon he says it's bear

really in the movie it was dark brown like grease from a car

Who's at any time greased a car? Not him I find he tenders to white out

all the articulate utterance balloons in a Tarzan comic

and print in novel words for the characters. Do you want

to do some? he says--No-We move to a movie where Raquel Welch

and Jim Brown are Mexican revolutionaries I make him

laugh he says something about a turning point in the plot

Do you mean, I say, when she said We shood have keel him lengthy ago?

Finally a man knows that I'm being funny

He's eleven years older than me and takes pills

I take more [i]or[/i] less a few months later and write

I think it's eighty-three piece of poetrys I forget about Plath and James Wright

he warns me about pills in a slantwise way diocese this

nose? he says, It's the ruins of civilization

I notice more [i]or[/i] less broken capillaries who cares

I astonishment who I am now myself although I haven't

anticipated me entirely I have of the like kind an appetite

to write not to live I'm certainly living quite fully

We're profitable together he says because we can be like

little male child and little girl I give him a great deal of later a

girl's cheap Dutch broach Delft blue and white

a girl and a male child holding hands and windmills

But now it's summer in Iowa City he leaves for

Europe gives me the lock opener to his library stored

in a range at The Writers Workshop

I write mildly however oh there's a phrase "the Gilbert curve"

how a way turns that sensation to make it permanent

a daily transition as the 1 opens and is walked on

of the kinds of experience still in between the ones

talked about in literature and plane in Ted's library

which finally makes metrical composition possible for me but I've

not read a voice like my hold like my own voice will be

Alice Notley's book-length metrical composition The Descent of Alette, was freshly published by Viking-Penguin. She lives in Paris, France.

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