Alice Notley

Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice 

 

So I’m an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover

yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach

thing no song sing but in the word

to which I’m starlessly unreachably faithful

you, pedant & you, politically righteous & you, alive

you think you can peel my sober word apart from my drunken word

my Buddhist word apart from my white sugar Thérèse word my

word to comrade from my word to my mother

but all my words are one word my lives one

my last to first wound round in finally fiberless crystalline skein

 

I began as a drunkard & ended as a child

I began as an ordinary cruel lover & ended as a boy who

          read radiant newsprint

I began physically embarrassing — “bloated” — &

          ended as a perfect black-haired laddy

I began unnaturally subservient to my mother &

          ended in the crib of her goldenness

I began in a fatal hemorrhage & ended in a

          tiny love’s body perfect smallest one

 

But I began in a word & I ended in a word &

          I know that word better

Than any knows me or knows that word,

          probably, but I only asked to know it —

That word is the word when I say me bloated

          & when I say me manly it’s

The word that word I write perfectly lovingly

          one & one after the other one

 

But you — you can only take it when it’s that one & not

          some other one

Or you say “he lost it” as if I (I so nothinged) could ever

          lose the word

But when there’s only one word — when

          you know them, the words —

The words are all only one word the perfect

          word —

My body my alcohol my pain my death are only

          the perfect word as I

Tell it to you, poor sweet categorizers

          Listen

Every me I was & wrote

          were only & all (gently)

That one perfect word