Academy of American Poets
View Cart | Log In 
Subscribe | More Info 
Find a Poet or Poem
Advanced Search >
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alice Notley
Alice Notley
Born on November 8, 1945, Alice Notley is the author of many collections of verse and the recipient of the 2007 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize...
More >
Want more poems?
Subscribe to our
Poem-A-Day emails.
FURTHER READING
Poems about Time
Figure
by Marjorie Welish
Meeting and Passing
by Robert Frost
Mimosa
by Mary Ruefle
On Time
by John Milton
Poem with Lines from Pierre Reverdy
by Sandra Simonds
Real Time
by Charlie Smith
Slur
by Jacek Gutorow
The Edges of Time
by Kay Ryan
The Moon in Time Lapse
by David Rivard
The Sun-Dial
by Adelaide Crapsey
Time does not bring relief (Sonnet II)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
What God Knew
by Marianne Boruch
Sponsor a Poet Page | Add to Notebook | Email to Friend | Print

Individual Time

 
by 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






Copyright © 2013 by Alice Notley. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on February 19, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
Larger TypeLarger Type | Home | Help | Contact Us | Privacy Policy Copyright © 1997 - 2013 by Academy of American Poets.