What we don't know is what we know.
What we don't know is what we truly know.
Everything in the world points toward sexuality - invents it - and this
poem (or sweet cascade of them) is a good example of that.
And with that love - and the fact of the feat of living in a
place to have that.
Paris (where Alice now lives) is the City of Light. It's called
that - in the way a poem fetches words for (its) meaning. The city
exhibits itself on the page (have I said this carefully enough).
She resolutely foregoes waste.
"I don't believe in the universe any more."
Poetry absolves the page. Poetry that's this good does.
I went to remembered streets when I got there.
It was once with someone
and I kept thinking
I don't have something with me. Maybe a person
Has been stolen:
Turn
onto rue des Couronnes there's a steep high park
Contains a piece of me
Purely
White crocuses adhering to thawed trauma
It's a placid
earth of horror and
from it
I begin
No nation now
only a
city.
I have nothing to add.
And even with that it is not enough to say that. Everything is an
inspiration. Everything is as it is. Death hangs like a pallor under
the city - giving it then the weight of what can lust up.
Lively enough.
Alice remembers The Thrill Is Gone.
I remember The Thrill is Gone.
But the thrill is not gone - the memory (a shared memory) - and the
thrill ("The Thrill") lives on. Memory is always a postulate - and it
is always true. And the form is also shared (the form of the
memory) - and the form lives on (the form lives on).
Alice has a way of setting each line atop its others with a uniqueness
that is rare. They dissemble. This has been done by some (in ways)
but seldom with such settling grace. The lines flake. They float.
Only for / in us do they (perhaps) cohere. That's why we're here.
Try to make love in our bed
and then later down the page (is it down?) -
Trying to make love in our bed.
- (a very different thing indeed (in deed)). It's possible to be a casualty
of this kind of elocution - a learned casualty (having learned). And
the sad stiff honesty of -
That my lovers are dead.
- such that that too is a memory (memory being its own kind of
reminder (a rather binding kind at times)). Language is always a
reminder.
There's an equation here between the body and the city.
I'm bringing you these blood-soaked
songs streets or songs
Only language allows us to know who we are. True enlightenment
occurs without it - but language contains the allowance (it has us in
it) - and poetry is the compassionate epitome of that.
Alice does not so much write as she composes. We can feel the
touch of her hand on or about middle C - and from there ranging
where the energy of the emotion takes. We flow - with that we flow.
I'm standing on a Paris street with a sack of lyrics
This is roughly equivalent to "I'm standing on a Paris street with my
heart in my hand" (as a slightly genericized Piaf might have had it).
But (but) -
I'm standing on a Paris street with a sack of lyrics
I've dipped some in blood as I had to
a very clear red
I don't know who you are I never have.
This takes us out of the realm of the rumor of truth (truth is always
a rumor) - which is what description is - and into the personal gut of
the matter of the personal gut. There's no getting around that
one - not if you're the you / not if you're the I - and not (at all) if
you're the reader (a listening feeling reader) either.
And all of this because -
I'm bringing you these blood-soaked
songs streets or songs
I'm bringing you the blood-soaked ones you forgot
You hadn't forgotten the blood
before, you kept it apart
This reminder (this memory) holds a whole relationship in the cask of its
very few lines. "You hadn't forgotten" - no (you hadn't forgotten) -
"you kept it apart" (you kept it apart). This you - you - you hadn't failed
to do something (an inadvertent failure) - you had kept (kept (you had
kept)) it apart (you had kept it apart). This kind of lesion lances language.
(No to mention love.)
This is the genius of the moment / this is the genius of a momentous thing.
This is the genus of the moment / this is the genus of a momentous thing.
You aren't supposed to break free. What you become
is owned by the curve of the universe
As if being
knew what I was
Are these real words?
Are you there?
There's a soft gentle seeming contradiction between "What
you become / is owned by the curve of the universe" and "As
if being / knew what I was" – but it's in that interstice that we
live (abide) - (and this is how she says that).
A woman says, I don't find
the concept of the self very interesting.
I don't care, the fate of my hand is to sing.
Each syllable of this proves that / bears that out. We are the
recipients of Alice's good graces.
It's a sort of urban irrealism (urrealism) with heart.
We have to look in this to find what's hidden (often on the
"surface"). Poetry is an indication that life is like that.
Time creates fragments - but fragments (equally)
fragment time.
And (such that) one the poems so kindly begins -
I remember the preferred lovable
which means "you"
and ends -
I remember all this for I have nothing. All I
have for you
Alice brings the poem (the book) down toward the end with a
kind of contralto complexity. And us with it - not down in the
sense of that kind of down feeling - but settled (and
comfortably so).
From there - everything looks forward ("the child's drawings of a
flower's life, / still hooked on fertility") - toward a kind of
ambience. And that ambience - in some very real senses - is the
poem itself - this (this) poem / and the possibility of poem as
poem as well.
We were in the parlor of a modest home with window shades
listening to a CD, several of us
We heard the dead poet read
a poem which ended with sun-up
Another dead poet sat across the room
listening: but we were all the same one
singing. We
have always made the sun come up.