April Not an Inventory but a Blizzard

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 1997 by Notley, Alice

I met Ted at two parties at the same house

at first he insulted me because, he said later,

he was mad at girls that night; at the second we danced

an elaborate foxtrot with dipping--he had once taken one lesson

at an Arthur Murray's. First I went into an empty

room and waited for him to follow me. I liked the way

his poems looked on the page open but delicately arranged.

I like him because he's funny he talks more like

me than like books or words: he likes my knowledge and

accepts its sources. I know that there are Channel swimmers

and that they keep warm with grease because of

an Esther Williams movie. We differ as to what kind

of grease it is I suggest bacon he says it's bear

really in the movie it was dark brown like grease from a car

Who's ever greased a car? Not him I find he prefers to white out

all the speech balloons in a Tarzan comic

and print in new words for the characters. Do you want

to do some? he says--No-We go to a movie where Raquel Welch

and Jim Brown are Mexican revolutionaries I make him

laugh he says something about a turning point in the plot

Do you mean, I say, when she said We shood have keeled him long ago?

Finally a man knows that I'm being funny

He's eleven years older than me and takes pills

I take some a few months later and write

I think it's eighty-three poems I forget about Plath and James Wright

he warns me about pills in a slantwise way See this

nose? he says, It's the ruins of civilization

I notice some broken capillaries who cares

I wonder who I am now myself though I haven't

anticipated me entirely I have such an appetite

to write not to live I'm certainly living quite fully

We're good together he says because we can be like

little boy and little girl I give him much later a

girl's cheap Dutch brooch Delft blue and white

a girl and a boy holding hands and windmills

But now it's summer in Iowa City he leaves for

Europe gives me the key to his library stored

in a room at The Writers Workshop

I write mildly yet oh there's a phrase "the Gilbert curve"

how a street turns that sensation to make it permanent

a daily transition as the curve opens and is walked on

of the kinds of experience still in between the ones

talked about in literature and even in Ted's library

which finally makes poetry possible for me but I've

not read a voice like my own like my own voice will be

Alice Notley's book-length poem, The Descent of Alette, was recently published by Viking-Penguin. She lives in Paris, France.