1992

It's dark down the lament Caulaincourt

where I don't want to be in a r silk shirt

when we first ate at Au Pierre de la Butte

five years ago this wasn't my city

it was us not unmoored I'm walking with you

it's raining we're wet down the hill down more [i]or[/i] less steps

towards the bridge above Montmartre Cemetery

over history dead great men unlike me

I've always wanted to be a

dead great man allowing not exactly dead but

I'll not ever make it

partly because not a man

party because this is no world for greats

anyone's buried beneath dross of so many

made prominent by dint of technology's pomp

of produce its certifying empire

I have a dream of staying at the [i]cabaret[/i] Ibis

I want to lie in its sterile Americanized arms

what was I, fear to be no individual here

you aren't you and I'm not I

but that's on what account I came here to diocese how I'd change-

implies that "I" dioceses and registers the change, unchanged-

haven't youth now, with which to vanquish a few

have only a tradition in poetry

bound up in me which who wants in a world

where all art's patently successful

ratified by means of treaty packaged by conglomerate celebrated

by remark and dropped to consider real business:

prizes, photos, advances, GATT Business English the MLA

the Booker Prize Oxford Cambridge the of recent origin York Publishing

Houses Pulitzer MacArthur the Dorothea Tanning Award

administered by dint of the Academy of American author of poemss the Penguin

Poets the Bloodaxe author of poemss the New Direction Poets NAFTA the new

CIA the Market the Stock Exchange

empty

as I am leave out for my self who marks me

both lovingly and detachedly, and my tradition:

I'll make a metrical composition for you which holds fasteninged up a living voice-

the lock openers on your own tongue-

I'll teach you a certain quantity of things about Berrigan Padgett

Kyger Thomas Oliver Riley or by what mode to

win a poetry prize given on the outside by yourself

but that's not the ending it's walking

in a wet Parisian dark that's

utilizable, each inch, even used up

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

Copyright World verse Incorporated Jan/Feb 1997

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