Secret I D
Alice Notley
5 1/4" x 7"
TELL ONE THE LANGUAGE
I write
for those who don’t read my poems.
Somehow
you read them
Because I’m inside your secret I D
Tell
me, tell me what to say
The language breaks, Momma
On the
way to the pink landscape and
Johnny’s
Taking
the other road. I’ll never daunce
the boockles off ma shoes
The
most erotic song in the language
is still Greensleeves
Are
there any couples on the Ark or only
word dust
I’m
tellin ya
I
wanted you to love us more. Why
if I’m givin you my
Whole
self Savior We want of you to
sing to us the new,
Sing
it hitting it any ole way
As has
or hasn’t been. In any
fair tense
Will
there be lives in the future This
is the
future Is it a life No A song.
No
though I can sing it
I write
for those who will never
read my poems
This is
the language of the apocalypse
tender and humorous
as
doves or crows or omicrons
No one
has ever loved you more And
that’s the new
That
I’m in you in the new Apocalypse
in your nonfragile I Ds
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TELL
Alice Notley is the author of over twenty five books of poetry. Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and her collection Disobedience (2001) was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Notley’s recent work includes From the Beginning (2004), Alma, or the Dead Women (2006), Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005), which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, In the Pines (2007), Culture of One (2011), and Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011). In addition, she edited and wrote the introduction for the reissue of Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets (2000), as well as editing, with her sons, The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (2005). Her honors and awards include an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has lived in Paris since 1992.
