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

which I'm starlessly unreachably faithful

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

you think you can peal 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