Individual Time

Alice Notley

I'm calling out from pictures to your vision creating it
turn right, that dream building cutglass window in door.
Automatically inside their apartment, you don't have
to get there. This is before the lost sacred corpus vision,
someone says Look at my author photo. I
don't really want to I'm turning to defiant metal
not a dream part, can you see it where the movement of
images turns back towards me I want a
different, how I'm portrayed because you can't
see me, visage. Look at me please. The soul is so thick
larger than the portrait what you'd call madonnaesque,
and then there was more hoax a view as I am
the rose here. And you never wanted to be that, did I?
I was waiting to see what I would be. Blackness
eats you but your soul eats it without your knowing that
figure, because it is causing your appearance to the world.
They arrange me in clothes of Easter, or of
the first day of classes, but I'm projecting pigment
cracked gold on fire, thinking braver thoughts.
It takes courage to get to the ancient altar
of the moment where I create individual time.
The picture body untremblingly stares large-eyed
I also create the tablets of exponential seeing: it brightens
all around it, as I'm the apparatus of what there is to be;
and I am making it, my time visibly becoming me.

About this poem:
"I was trying to change the mental spaces within a poem, so that past and future could be more coincident—as I am my past right now."

Alice Notley

Poems by This Author

The Descent of Alette ["A car" "awash with blood"] by Alice Notley
"A car" "awash with blood"

The Descent of Alette ["I stood waiting"] by Alice Notley
"I stood waiting" "for some minutes" "in this very" "alive darkness—"

The Descent of Alette ["I walked into"] by Alice Notley
"I walked into" "the forest;" "for the woods were lit" "by yellow

The Descent of Alette ["Presently"] by Alice Notley
"Presently" "we neared a pale beach," "narrow"

The Descent of Alette ["The water" "of the river"] by Alice Notley
"The water" "of the river" "was mild-

At Night the States by Alice Notley
At night the states

Hematite Heirloom Lives On (Maybe December 1980) by Alice Notley

No world is intact by Alice Notley
No world is intact

Poem by Alice Notley
St. Mark's Place caught at night in hot summer

Poem by Alice Notley
You hear that heroic big land music

Poem by Alice Notley
Why do I want to tell it

Woman in Front of Poster of Herself by Alice Notley
Said I shouldn't

World's Bliss by Alice Notley
The men & women sang & played

Individual Time

Alice Notley

Poems by This Author

Further Reading