12 Desert for All of Music to Take Place Alice Notley Only time in Catholic church, empty in afternoon There was a red-rhinestone light Well that was once. Often are shacks with silver windmill & salty trees Or the one inhabitant of Arrowhead Junction Renowned for the filth of his person & of establishment where brown boards fall down. When I grow up to be him I'll feel a little funny. Trucks & trains go east in 4 AM sounds & river air Also therein cars of wildness go apart from me He has green eyes The movies give full love Comparable to nothing else ever to be And I know that Flies wings airy hands Does somebody grow up did a man child die live He will inhabit America & his body forever His eyes are blue He's the guy who calls up every day just to Tell you it's raining. He's disinterested in music and's The only one who knows how to whistle Gas station attendants stay up all glamorous night Red horses dawning air Mountains shrink closer up you get Monuments & landmarks being large deformed rocks He wants to speak educated as a matter of courtesy & in Assertion of superior breeding of sons of poor widow-women I could become awhile too stupid to love a person for that He has brown eyes with light coming through, his sorrow center Seems above them mid-forehead. Am I just an occupant? I dwell in air, I take up air, I hold possession of my air Am an accuracy but whose, or rather what's? Everyone drives off. The library's upstairs from The jail guys flirt through the bars of With a fat, dusty girl. I consider flirting with them too they Seem to have vast appreciative powers There being nothing else at the moment for them to have, But I go on upstairs. Strangely, Gas station attendants stay up all night. Boys gas station guys Unrequited loves objects undead I'll always still wish they would love me Yellow mesquite flowers they praises appear, or I love the landscape because I love these guys & also the movies. This big Desert landscape flowering guys movies feeling Is love, every one & kind at once. Here's a dark in bed song: Tarantulas & black widows & all kinds of spiders They bite & crawl around your room They're very poisonous You'll get it when you know you get it right now I think I'll sing the whole song Love is all you need when you're getting in love when It's time to So when you get around love it gives you a hand For time's running out You'll get what you trout Time & love in space is the end of this song. They say my cousin Mike has a tender heart. * * * How come Mohave men & women Are used to each other getting fat? It's part of how they are It's part of how they're big Big faces & features hair where each hair is a feature Their feelings would be shapes big solid shapes things That might be held up in two hands The "white" Indian woman's blue tattoos about her mouth They have a Cry House that burned down & all the dogs. An other-world Navajo couple pass through town All in conchos & velvets & hairdos Maybe they're going to go into, Where so many mysteries go on, That green-painted-glass front walls lace Named so funnily, in red letters, SNOOKER BILLIARDS. I'm accurate diamond white hollowness An aching for something to be true that won't quite come through To being an ultimate holding or knowing Of a mountain or a gas station or a love moment Through that hollow of one's does blow the best blue wind Underivative, unworshipable. Or am I an impostor? The important erotic events of my time transpire tonight At green-black watered-moon river's side Whether inside or outside of cars. Desert verbena momentarily purples dust, Yucca blossoms a second's cream in the year car goes past. Herman, the official town crazy man: Somebody goes to his funeral. I guess I've been in hopeless love with every man in town Since I was 4. His mistress ties her hair back with a purple ribbon But his dead wife had a pince-nez & a pilot's license Rivers mountain sky Endless cross-ties & poles & stars If you peel off another layer of air & another Your eyes still can't possess these things Yet they're so clear, but in so much space, which is air I say "I can see air!" She says No you can't I tell her it's all these little dots, dots of air. Air has to be seeable I'm sure it is & how can the surface of silence, the sky, be a color--blue? & how can all the secrets be in something that's a color? I'm not one of the 15 towheaded Walters kids meant For their kind of trouble, not One of the 5 or 6 Wheeler kids meant for their Kind of trouble, nor a Mejia, nor one of the several Garcias Whose lot is a little more tragic, for everyone to marvel at At dramatic Mexican funerals-- I'm one of the several Notley kids destined for their kind of. There's one I never tell anyone hardly even myself that I have a crush on, Because he's the creature most like myself, thus No consummation imaginable I just love him for years every day. But I know I'll always be this me now, & it's almost only air, & other me's horizontal layers of air On the one flat detail of the original, almost only air me. No, no that's not it. They'll tell me about it in time. Hah, they will? Hah.             I'm a wide dust earth & Mountains & river & a sky of blue that gives back nothing. To me that's not to be strong, but to be just that. Is anyone else in America that? Is everyone? Fill it with loves & movies & take it by car, But only at night in playing-at-romantic river time. The daytime blue sky gives back nothing. I reflect the nothing time, & love the romantic time too At which I'm not just peeking At which I'm singing love with you. The lovers in cars aren't movie stars, and They're so tacky. Or maybe, They're not love, & there's no love, except There's a big, big shape like a feeling You can hold it up in your two hands, practically And present it to the sky. (Alice Notley is the author of twenty-five books of poetry, including Mysteries of Small Houses, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and winner of The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry that year. Her latest, Disobedience (Penguin, 2001), is a book-length poem which was the focus of her uproarious reading in New York on November 12. [See Event Reviews.] Originally from Needles, California, she lives in Paris.) ~ . ~ . ~