Table of Contents
ALSO BY ALICE NOTLEY
165 Meeting House Lane
1971
Phoebe Light
1973
Incidentals in the Day World
1973
For Frank OHaras Birthday
1976
Alice Ordered Me to Be Made
1976
A Diamond Necklace
1977
Songs for the Unborn Second Baby
1979
Dr. Williams Heiresses
1980
When I Was Alive
1980
How Spring Comes
1981
Waltzing Matilda
1981, REISSUED 2003
Tell Me Again
1982
Sorrento
1984
Margaret & Dusty
1985
Parts of a Wedding
1986
At Night the States
1988
From a Work in Progress
1988
Homers Art
1990
The Scarlet Cabinet
(with Douglas Oliver) 1992
To Say You
1993
Selected Poems of Alice Notley
1993
Close to me & Closer... (The Language of Heaven) and Dsamre
1995
The Descent of Alette
1996
etruscan reader vii
(with Wendy Mulford and Brian Coffey) 1997
Mysteries of Small Houses
1998
Byzantine Parables
1998
Disobedience
2001
Iphigenia
2002
From the Beginning
2004
Coming After: Essays on Poetry
2005
City Of
2005
Alma, or The Dead Women
2006
Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 19702005
2006
In the Pines
2007
Above the Leaders
2008
Reason and Other Women
2010
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some of these poems have been previously published in The PulchritudinousReview, Fence, Margie, Daedalus, Upstairs at Duroc, and Cock-Now Zine.
In memory of Marie
I
Down on Front Street
Once again at the beginning I am down on Front Street,
by the old drugstore, the pharmacy where all healing starts.
Its possible one begins in healing in mercy in self-kindness. Dont
you know this? I dont know anything. Theres a sudden change
in the weatherthree signals click click click. Because
it was too hot and stark, but now we can have a cloud, the most
necessary thing: some say its for rain but I think not, its
a cloud, its itself, grey and luminous and sun-shielding. Do
you love it? I fear it, but I gradually wonder if I should. A vast and
silken entity, and one sees that it possesses tentacles, extensions,
silky grey arms hanging down. With a joyous look on his face a dark
man touches one of these armsfor the cloud is that close, its in the street;
but Im afraid and enter the pharmacy to watch the cloud from behind
the glass wall: should I go back outside and touch it? Eventually...
At the Beginning Stop Suffering
I am mercy; I have no understanding of who I am;
though, with my thousand arms, I have written of my own
nature since writing began. I inhabit you and you write about me again.
There is always the sound or color or feeling in which I can arrive.
Lying in bed suffering from loneliness or anger the woman
with eyes closed sees me bending over her, a many-armed figure
wearing a rayed disk hat. Not a clear image, but made of the blue and red
brocade beneath the eyelids. Yes you were right, you contain all
the qualities and possibilities, all the godsIm here inside when
you need me; I can come to you when youve forgotten my
name; a voice of yours, hidden to you, calls for mercy and mercy always comes.
The Mercy Moment
The most outstanding characteristic of the mercy moment, the time when she comes, is how instantly the suffering stops. You have to stop thinking. You dont have time for guilt, or you will neither sleep nor begin again. This was how I started this time; then I asked myself what I would like to read, or rather what items I wanted in my culture, to contain created, newly and justly, my needs. The world isnt a text to be deciphered, it is a new creation though ancientbut what is antiquity to me? Every moment must destroy suffering anew; a cloud enters you, to begin in.