Songs and Stories of the Ghouls

by Notley, Alice;

  incorporate myself

  into this shape

  Can you see an army’s needs

  can you see a leg blown off

  What do an army’s needs look like

  name the future tense sign

  in the first conjugation

  a beautiful adjacent inflection

  flexing the

  knee of a woman, myself

  sure to make up such separate

  words as

  leg and self

  why should I leave myself out

  when I’m not here

  she gave the last kisses to them

  but they will have omitted her

  first chaos containing, you say,

  the sounds of land mines exploding

  and greater explosions, more

  pieces tossed

  what do an army’s needs look like

  flesh chunks whirled round in hurricane

  Walking away turns to look over shoulder in black dragging power out of time pursed lips less disapproving in the tornout robe along the strand. Someone decided, for you, to destroy Carthage or Corinth, make you weak a beautiful invention of the owners for you. Where the beauty is, take some and use it against them. If they invented it take some. Is she willful though right away a compiler of fates I will use, who can’t get a job at the bureau. She’s pulling power away from his torso, leaving. I’m inclined to use you myself, motivated mask. It was my city first, and I found it before you could rule, because your secrets were mechanical. You’ll have to beg for it from me, you’ll have to come backwards behind your own words because there’s no picture of you. A curse was invoked with great solemnity upon anyone who might attempt to rebuild the city. Is that a picture? You were so barren you couldn’t hear the beauty in the scratches when twigs dragged against the panes on the other side of old records. I lived with whatever you said because I could sing it, the sources say. The ruins ploughed to express final destruction I WILL tell in the recitative of misery and fury what you do to me still. Even backwards can she know different word if the salt’s ploughed in. But all words are different without their masks.

  You don’t know who you’ve been

  at any meddling or desperate

  point

  the nerves I’m displaying along

  my back, to be here, are they it

  that is how I think wordlessly

  but I still have to tell you, as if

  you’re me, centuries of distinctions

  the woman in the hardcase views

  the worms archly

  you named it, I didn’t, fascist smiling

  runt

  I remember enough of this

  to ensure my phrasing

  But I’ve never been anyone I knew

  You’re not used to you’s you really are

  Black sequins compression. Only the pressure is certain, lay this next to another. She’ll turn around on initial discomfort. The sequins are appealing, beside the violets that are paper seals. At first it was too compressed, so I’ve diffused it she says. I’m looking back at the future so it won’t hurt with its depravity, dead man. And no one went with me that smooth because these jewels when nothing cost. Don’t you see that once there was no cost, because there wasn’t really a compression, because there were shiny sequins. There’s something I have to destroy. Place the humble sequins next to the light waves I’m in struggle takes the eyes. She takes a mask to use its eyes I remember this— have eyes for light posed a given. You needed to see, if you were a maid. She took the light and broke it as hard as she could so you couldn’t tell it. The black disks scattered deaths of details to place there all the change I had.

  Flat gold the color’s no longer in her clothing

  it’s in you. This is what they used to call light,

  when light was a story. Now you don’t know

  if it exists: does it? I’m stripping the conqueror’s

  word: From the secret of my body to the desert

  of my feet what color I can’t follow as if it were

  light or you. That’s because I broke everything.

  You’re what they used to call light, when light

  was what they kept making. It isn’t there anymore.

  See inside the lower spine of the pianist his back’s

  cut open. I watch what they once called nerves

  move as he plays learning to think. We’re

  redefining relation not looking at each other.

  I stand here in whose eyes

  the name of light is audience

  burning into my forehead

  waitresses’ voices along the spine

  if what was once light

  isn’t

  my audience

  what are you doing to me?

  who was I broken for

  was it worth it to be?

  If I’m a shade

  acting

  what once will occur

  it must be for the song I wore

  hear what they all said to you

  a gesture or tone: someone lies

  in the intentional tongue

  betraying you again and again

  the one

  or the many

  whose thoughts I stand here before

  Because there’s no light, what an

  outrage

  was made of the science

  of definitions

  like what happened to me

  performing here in a mad scene

  not

  and never mad

  I hadn’t seen clearly until I enacted her

  So stay before the beginning it is a ghoul. It’s hard, she said. I’m walking as ghoul towards the shore again to show you my magic face for the beauty song may be produced from horror if you’ve been there and come backwards what else do you know? Outside my body’s perceived worth I’m interested in the shape made by my omission from the lists, such omissions or holes are filled though no one sees them. What song am I singing while I’m not here in my dead rags in my solitude? The power’s in those empty spaces such as solitude and missing body parts. Dorsally he knows the words dear lord above bring back why articulate those so he thinks past no-love’s meanness in the language of the submerged words but sing now your song in due order. All things are the gift of the earth, which, too, is not here, but I the omitted one am this flight which provides you with a presence more real than life though only her voice and bones remain to this gaunt one.

  Where city arises from salt flats

  I must have walked out of a station

  to see it, pale blue, with birds

  whose cathedral not mine from

  before the salt and before;

  but I have something to do here for you.

  Came back to life but hadn’t

  minded being extinguished and would be

  again, as cities disappear along the

  dead shore; I was too frightened, then,

  to hear her clearly. But I believe this

  city is where I see and hear best.

  Having bypassed the origin of man

  It’s an echo of everything you’ve ever done. I know and that’s its meaning. Before we were covered with echoing eyes was the first echo pure? Who was first conquered, they say you spoke no worthy language. Salt from every pore and each a primary mask or echo of you. But when the light is broken up you can’t hide behind it. She gave it back to the places no one can conquer. If this word hurts my mouth it’s because it has no mask on, and something of it is indigenous but not assigned for nothing’s assigned. We know no one holds ground; we are the founding ghouls of this nation.

  Woman with antlers, deer-headed antlered woman in black against black lace, black-headed deer woman, Lady of the mountains whose antlers melt into lace. Lady of the mountains, emerges from my right side and all the lacy scars there, why is she a deer? Because I’m not anthropomorphic, soul of the mountain night. This is my echo from before, from what I had made for you voc
ally, and from before we acceded to the time line never like lace. Lady the mountain middle of no spatial universe. I have the antlers she says which extend from the deer head in the middle of our echo. Lady of Wild Animals, for whom the animals return, the deer with the heart or breath line, through the mouth to the center echoing. Do you hear the words of the conquerors or do you hear the voices of deer? echoes, can you find a center in an echo. I’m finding, with the finder, the antlers paths leading from my head. I am the center of it, the center of the lady.

  Do you think you had to be able to

  speak or sing, in order to go mad?

  in which language did a woman

  once first approach that barrier

  before we drowned in your alphabet

  They will cast my child into the sea.

  Have they ever done differently

  through cypresses return to my home

  having the same ultimate

  sign, so that I can be a woman

  example of their tables and diagrams

  I call on the soul of decipherment

  to strip power from their dream

  and give it to mine. In black on the strand

  where detritus hardens into beauty

  anything I hold—a pearl in each hand—

  protects me from their words. They say that I. . .

  but I didn’t. They say that I—but in

  the old language I is who speaks to herself,

  in images and carvings of sounds.

  Will always serve a meal with the

  fingerbones of a child mixed in—He can’t

  help it? but I can help what I—

  I screamed at the forecast to change

  the letters of the deaths. Change them back

  to natural forms in my eyes first given.

  I am holding her from before

  your distribution of mines

  I don’t know how to concur

  and never will, without blood frigid

  in my wounds. Song to aid secrets

  quaeque magos, Tellus, I have willed

  te quoque, traho. I. Mad as grief,

  slaughter your decipherment. If I

  kill so you can’t have, am I even seen?

  That you wrote me lectures as soon as

  you counted. I want this song

  to betray history, since history’s now mine.

  Personnel surround the mine

  which itself appears to be singing

  as if it were Medea or Dido, the same

  mouth from which comes anything

  power I have, to you the

  material voice, whose control

  means your destruction.

  Like a scratchy record—my documents are recorded on old equipment.

  If there is nothing to do but enfold you in transparent plastic and watch you breathe, you, baby, so I can get better, it’s because it’s all I was born for.

  If none of the new words are true to you, the old ones each spread out, into scratchy encirclings, she said to attack the center of the note, but the note could be anywhere I implore.

  The pattern ripped where we won’t weave it so she walks here stalking the role which she still wants to sing in no light but that inside the record. Isn’t that story all gone, itself

  and you believed

  she was a murderer, not a magician: as soldiers slip inside us and tell no spell but unilingual chant along the blade

  I am the scratchy spell

  document not inside words but centers of notes to disappear through black sequins. She’s still alive

  does she know it?

  They want us to know what they said; they all want us to recognize them.

  I only recognize baby breathing

  each note. They want me to leave her the new Medea. They’re afraid because they don’t know these words though words familiar as ghouls along the shore sing I am beauty to the ghoul chant sister.

  Accept this magic note.

  If there’s change you put it into this sculpture’s slot the room where once before Carthage we’re not in the named light, soldier. In this gold the other side of a word like bear or not to be borne unless you make up nerves for it but in the shadow-nerves this song. For that breakthrough into the Shadow, we the dead and mutilated the defective dip our hands. Let Mavis in, without obligation face most all the beautiful face. I am the most beautiful face said a ghoul one down, you have promoted the whore until it’s still. Every whore in the history collection come forward with his face of a woman to find if he were beautiful so Mavis sing. He had shaved skull to make a shape under the wind but there’s no real wind. I would have been placed wherever you wanted to kill some, for I have long use and no signature; am I glad you’ll be dead too, nameless no-record or no-document; put to head hard-liner calls for a shoot, always calling. But there is no bloodfill of ticks here of wisdom so say what they took from you in order to keep their own mien with mine they’d say to any linguistic heiress or bird. This is the shade of that thrush leave it alone. I can’t calculate the arrows in time you thought you were whole but didn’t know now there’s only narrow to a single expansion your little death as viewed by the times bolstered by them successful with one’s death the real shadow Mavis sings, that’s what the power called it till I took power we the shadow I saw heads and fingers, hands, push up through the soil. That was us, so Mavis sings.

  the commanders regret life’s brevity for themselves their parent beard they are the class thousand wars to whom only comes the elusive spring came not to me magician though I broke the gods of their procuration startled the common places ripped to bear up their navy or oral possession they neither rule me nor sequester my bitterest regnum of itinerant fact I arrived to make fold of auric tendancy in the atmospheric transverse unturned to necessitate honesty’s pay while they cynically bade us address a plaint to feigned arbitration assemble and expend in invention primarily to please the fleet not the deep, oh fasten up smoothly your accessible beauty its unnecessary and illimitable mode you are the conquerors paying no one, being vantage’s own surly breath being the simplest invective mantled in the letters of victorious lead

  Reprise. No prize.

  I’m in a store that’s everywhere

  food on the shelves, bread; but

  who does this part of experience

  serve?

  That you allow me to eat

  That you think you allow me to think:

  have implanted thoughts in my head:

  that if you don’t extinguish me you will

  substitute for my savings—

  my own love—

  your images. Technologists with youth blonde

  cruel. I have to learn you, waiting to see

  within me whatever you’ve placed:

  lies made material visions not mine.

  As you have declared my emotion: that which

  your poems incarnate—my supposed emptiness

  of intellect to be possessed by your commodious

  greed: is there enough territory within me, for you?

  never

  enough room for a torturer.

  I was in flames. They were only lines, it was only a drawing. I left the drawing back there, for years, several drawings of a girl myself always burning. Because of the old stove? a quotation. The flames are straight lines fire drawn by me. I crawled through the magic flames, pulled myself through and left the east side of the more remote continent. If you’ve chosen wrongly; or did someone implant an image in you? How innocent your very purposes I find indeed: said the soldier to the fire. In this document we record how purple was first mixed by shooting red and blue sacs with a gun. Or rubbed matte paint on her nipples, so no one would see them; and if you bleed you’ve been reared on blood; you musn’t soothsay with numbers the laic convergence of six lines in my own breath, natural lines, that is, rather straight not precise in the later way. The oncoming tempest has been invoked in its beauty because it’s us, and I must have
always contributed to the cause. Whose words are these? Child, they can touch the glass to your forehead, to make an incision for their implant; or I’ll stand on the convergence of the lines until I speak truly. I was in flames but they were lines, burning me up with change or chance though I did nothing but not do. The parallel fiery lines that have been altered to converge within one alone. It is roughly where all location trembles emotively. If the continent they found of self-hatred has no biologic basis, I can turn the flames outward, having been the target as one until continent collapse. It exists in my regard and if you kill me it is dead the woman said. I know where I am now. All art has for its origin

  Justice may appear in the

  guise of a hard, devious mother

  I want shoes for my baby

  son my werewolf son

  None of you can sing a song

  The best you can do is breathe

  every breath opining

  following the prescribed instrument

  which is now a hatchet

  Justice has Egyptian hair because

  you’ll be dead; she wants ten

  dollars from you; I’ve offered mine

  None of you sing; you beg for each

  other’s love in chopped-up phrases:

  every breath opining a duty to

  the gods of the times, whose times

  Justice isn’t a pleasant woman

  Her baby has a wolfish face that only

  I could love; the Egyptian gods

  have animal heads don’t they: the

  dead man loves Justice’s baby

  Having had his soul weighed by her

  Take your backpack off, it’s in the

  way, she says gruffly; he plays

  with her hairy baby. I’m trying

  to tell you, the Law knows you’re

  as wise as a wolf; only the baby

  is important; only I can sing

  the Law that hard and devious woman

  says that this is just. You have