Suite for Alice
— for Alice Notley, poet, November 8, 1945 – May 19, 2025
Suddenly the biography and all the people in it
As if one’s not one’s self but must be the others
They’re there everywhere, in the air, the salt, the sea, the chair
Between words, the others’ words
I didn’t think that then
Between thoughts all of this
The thought all of this they thought it
And can’t get off the train of thought
Of this accidental thought — one other person
In the incident that’s not battered by the thought’s sound
A car door closing, a ka-chunk
A kind of crunch of time the closing door effects decisively
And now a memory I am an incident it wasn’t
Incidental but when you put them all
When all’s added up it’s a performance, a kind of performance
And I wake this morning forget to fasten my pants
Zip up my pants faded worn jeans with zip fly
And crows cawing again, they’re at feeders
Making a racket and a mess
And bodies crowd the too-small space
And body’s too small, my body’s too small
To contain the incidentals the crows the spaces
The thoughts of others the others’ thoughts in me in time
But it’s a modest thing, to be this one person
—
Looking out window then as a boy, bewildered boy
Blowing bubbles how could it be by being here, impossible
A lot of attitude I didn’t then have, what did I know, that little boy
Dark, dark eyes, very inward glance hooded and within the dark
Covers over the head can you breathe in there does world dissolve
As cars go by, where, all the lives not one’s own
That one doesn’t know details of
Or forgot details if there are details
They flash by so swiftly — good-bye Joan, your smile, crooked and old
You wouldn’t quit, had such a large and brash insistence
Good-bye Lynn, so embarrassing to lose a mind
And Michael, such a bitter divorce, it never ended
This betrayed love, broken up details smearing over all the
All the time in the caring, I mean the time one
Bumped into you in the street
And who were they, the people swimming by it must be
The ocean again that’s always there
And who will now walk through that door
Crashing the sun on the page
Sound of vacuum cleaner
They say “Hoover” they mean a dead president who cleans things up
I remember Iowa
Black earth and corn
—
The various rulers and their armies
The rule of bravery or strategy or sheer deranged nerve
They have no syntax but sign treaties they fail to keep
When not to their advantage
And the empire plods on being dissolved over four hundreds
Of years is abstract because is not own occurring
Nor so careful as this plastic spoon I have
Used and must preserve
Light on the subject
I guard the poem in it, this little word I cup
In my hand pour water all over it
It glistens in the twilight though
In reality at the moment — it’s mid-morning —
I say I love you with all my heart, might, soul
But aren’t those words that by saying them I must
Mean something abstract isn’t meaning abstract, tyrannical
Even a blade of grass, which I now write
Abstract, tyrannical, and sun on page not but is, yes, as I now write
There’s no now in now so no now other than description/abstraction?
Oh my old friend now gone your fierceness is not abstract
It’s a matchless voice a calling out saying
I am here forever in the poems and damn you who think otherwise the nerve
You tyrants buried in my curse
—
Running up, the water to the shore
So much of it goes on is if I write
It some kind of metaphor — hello George how’s gym this
Morning one can take delight even as
Very next breath, even as this one
Here are some qualities of human beings one would
Wish to emulate let them remain nameless
For all good people know what they are
In short not to denigrate or minimize
I’m so naive but why not
It comes from somewhere
Love is always the answer to the question
Not that one knows the question, it’s mistaken
For violence and self-justification maybe
Twisted sublimated sex that’s not even sex, in the desert, the wish to
Carry on indefinitely then the question of the line
Shorter or longer, which matters a great deal
And no one knows what love is there must be
No such outside the word for it
If a word’s ever “for”
Anything
—
Ancestors are not ghosts even ghosts are not ghosts
Recalling Alice in 1985 or 1986 (in her poems of that period)
Is a ghost really a ghost one elderly person to another she’d had a stroke
They call it a stroke but how would she know it her brain like a wriggly octopus
Two wriggly octopi groping toward one another (I mean the mind and so-called reality)
But there were people who had been larger who were there then vividly and suddenly gone
For whom death was a myth and there was nobody to be found
Hence the suddenness and the ghosting the shock that is poetry
—
She knew it was so, all the things she felt she did not feel them they were
After all — what?— not anything at all but her mind so dull now
She could think, remember, articulate, her sight now so blurry
Impossible to read but it was true, actually true,
Everything was out to get her
Every sound menacing
Every which way whatever direction she turned in
For a long time everything was trying to kill her — me — you — everyall and everyone
Trying to kill us everything’s bad for you all food all
Air to breathe
Don’t eat it!
Don’t breathe!
—
It’s clear there’s no way out of this but in such gold color
Or black, I mean he wore a red hat, an orange shirt
He was on the roof
Fell off the roof, coma and death
She drowned in Yuba River a young woman
And why the other woman
Who drove to death off cliff and these are things that happen
In a world like this who decided fate would have its way with us
Who’s fate or whose fate or is there fate that’s tyrannical and abstract
It was all, all of it, meant to be and was and is and may or may not later be
The case and whose thread does the spider weave
The myth of the women on the island singing
I’m in grip of their spell right now those singing women their charms
They don’t know it I’m sinking into some kind of hole
Standing up in it it’s impossible, low roof
But they say it’s my life
But what do they know?
—
There will be no tomorrow
We like today so much
(Steve Benson in Four Eyes, “Time-Squared”)
—
This book will change. It has to. I know I’m finally of no
Importance, as the promulgation of my details, because I’ve
Been so violated …
I am the mystery of this book
Thus will cease to speak so much of myself
As details, pieces. Can’t find myself in them there
As a one, as a life. A self is bigger than that because death has
Entered it, and re-enters it
Making a largeness of it, empty of plot
(Alice, “Becoming Egyptian” in Mysteries of Small Houses)
—
I’m not becoming myself any more I’m performing
It that means I’m making a character through whose bouch I speak these words
Someone else’s, it’s happening, it happens, who doesn’t do this, such things
It means to be a person, a kind of sound like blowing over top
Of empty bottle or wind you imagine in a spindly tree
Whereas the real person’s lost because never was
Another as soon as is gone hello everyone who appears
You are the person I suppose
And then what?
—
It’s a never-ending poem isn’t it in small bites
Due to short attention span and need
To get it done, be finished so as to
Begin fresh with a needed sense of happy possibility
All the things left out, a life’s a mystery who knows what happens
Possibly nothing so luminous so bright like a spark a life is
A quick spark — now you see it now you don’t — all
Friends (did I make them up, did they make me?) gone that far that fast
That much generating memory, well when did they not
Even now, talking to you, you’re dictating like a dictator
The books tell you how to cook what to cook
When to eat it it’s all
As impossible as the original mission
To be born and live as possible then not how does
One do such a thing, feat, circus act
Yet they do, each and every one
As if emperors on elephants
—
Had gone to the Modern, Brice Marsden if that’s his name
And what’s art but someone wasting time with this and that
And a confidence game, we all agree it matters
Then I raced through
Bold color and monochrome
Corporate interior decorating let’s make money look nice, smother you in it
But the smaller drawings are better they make you imagine
A world exists and a hand
And broken down buildings and a big emotional sky over there
With big emotional clouds in it
Spread out, pastel-colored
And not as elemental more mental (I mean I am
In this place, then another place, across the vista of time
and space
and scarcely
any
life
beyond these things
(disconcerting at first)
—
Every idea owned by someone
Signed, sealed, stamped, delivered I hate
Money it’s so crude a thought
—
Snowstorm, chains on the tires
In the physical world that’s an engineering feat
Who put all this together this way
Some extra blank pages to be filled with these words
One after the other across page in time till the next
One appears in brain then hand then later
Another supposed person is here now in the one
Word transcribed, it’s so, isn’t it, that
In the word’s the other is the seeing or hearing of it’s
The other one else where would word come from and go?
Foggy again on coast here
Trees still here, that is, the trees, here, are still
They’re still here in fog no wind now
To speak of one speaks all too frequently of wind
In the very dull and very old mind that’s fading away gradually
Till it becomes a smudge but minds don’t age how could a mind age no matter how poorly it may work
Across the landscape now you see it now you don’t
How did people then think of it — let’s leave before they
Come to get us or let’s stay they’ll never come they’ll
Come for the other guy who can believe
All in all
The cruelty, and, worse, the stupidity
Brute numb dull stupidity
Of the noble human animal
Steward of all the world
—
Birds can’t get to feeder it’s
Enclosed by a cage that only small birds can get into and out of
But they’re too wary or cagey to do it they’ll do without
The food. I’m bigger than this
Story I’ve swallowed the whole world I mean the ocean
To find out who I am who you are went to psychiatrist to find out
Who I am he said I will help you find out who you are
But who are you? I said to him and if it turns out I am you and you are me
Who will owe who money? The peaks are famous certainly in the photos of them
In the Central Valley when the weather cleared
And we could see the shape of the hills
Yellow now, and marvelous, what these words are telling you
That now in the setting sun
Literally trillions of images
In the digital camera the actual places
Upon which the images are fashioned
And what happens to the images?
—
I’m in car in San Diego calling Siri to ask how long it takes to drive home
But someone else answers — it’s her! —we’re joking around, poetry jokes, gossip
I’m at a beach parking lot but want to get to airport but guy at lot can’t tell me
How to get to airport that’s when I realize if I leave car at airport and fly home car
Will be stranded at airport in San Diego I’ll have to come back to San Diego to get it!
But how did this happen?
I made a stupid mistake
Had been in San Diego visiting poets and stayed in hotel and lost myself
And there’s no way my car could be in San Diego unless I drove it there
I could not have flown there as I thought I had and would now fly back
And there was no way to get from here to airport no road and no car
—
So I walk up the block trapped in time not even so much in these times
But the time of walking up the block and around it to the store
Over the years I had too often walked on that block to the store and back
What do you do in a life go to the store and the next day and the next and
Trapped in the time of walking to store
And back one day I popped free from time
I popped out of sequence out of walking that stretch for a second everything felt light I wasn’t there
That wasn’t the first time something like this had happened
It had happened a few years earlier on Third Avenue
I didn’t exactly leave time that time time slowed
And people slowed and walked in slow motion and had naked faces
They all looked vulnerable benign not hard but this time in 1991
I realized I wasn’t even there at all I was unlocated untimed
About a year and a half later there is no connection particularly
I left New York
(Alice, Mysteries of Small Houses, “101”)
—
Copying out this passage I leapt
Out of time was in a car driving someplace in Bay Area
With Alice (did this ever happen? If it happens in a poem
Does it happen? If it happens in so called real life real time but not
In the poem does it happen, really happen if it is memory true memory false memory does it happen?) was asking her about Phil’s Collected and Leslie’s problem with the chronology and the fights we had over this and she spoke
Dismissively about her many stupid insistences
—
Not that there’s a subject a person in mind but then
After later, before now, before before, how many deaths can there be
Before it’s one too many — one’s own — well so far I did
Not die it seems but appearances are deceptive and one carries on
Monstrously or otherwise taking up perfectly useful space and time
That might have been donated to a better cause
And once, she said in the darkness of the hour, I said to him “How
Can I now go on with all this sorrow
Can’t you give me a talisman, a vow, some protection?” And he said
“Yes, I can, just take this vow: ‘I’ll save all beings, end all confusion, develop all
wisdom, and become the Buddha right away’ ”
And she did
And indeed it had saved her
Every day in every moment till now
Though she’d forgotten all about it
Till she told it to me in Paris
Weeping
—
The whole of the life one’s, with all words, deeds, thoughts, and impacts on others,
Squeezing content into the two words of one’s name (maybe more than two)
So that
These simple words are redolent with expansive if indefinite meaning
New in the world
Which is why inscribed on one’s tombstone are only those two words, maybe a few
More words, a name, but not of a thing or any set of phenomena, and the dates when one began and ended
The content-filling project that has altered not only one but many majestic
worlds
And then becomes
For the others
Something to ponder and wonder
In the time between completion of project
And the forgetting of everything