ALICE NOTLEY FOREVER
Allie McKean

Feeling different here, like words in the obstruction 

of death, every house that gets flipped during the reno, 

the electrical surge that makes the clocks blink and itch, 

the wooden floors that make you look just beyond 

where you stand, where the sun is pinned to the window, 

thinning the plant’s shadow, all dust parading in the air,

wanting everything grave to ignite, to look real across a lineage

that makes you look very large for living,

to become a distance one goes back to, yours– a womanhood in mine, 

like a nocturnal sensibility that makes a field’s silences so depicted, 

that when each light in day grows, it is born shapeless and true

like an early breakfast alone, hands fresh from gardening, a sexual afternoon, 

it’s the way love was supposed to speak to all of us— as the most consequential act

and the longest distance that matters

I’m a sucker to believe we are held up exact 

to the way love denies us, as we carry it through everyone we do, 

like a shadow choreographing itself across a pond, a flicker and ripple against sun

that where I am uneven is not around an edge, but in full-shape, 

that is what you would say about the way two people need one another— 

things must be whole to experience instability 

husband and wife, mother and child, the poet and the dead they write upon, 

the way films are museums to a life we’ll never find but are, 

that poems are miracled disasters you find slipping off a raincoat, somewhere, 

outside of language, a clear song dews down to its muddiest hand 

& calls you to compose between invention and the enemy, 

living is always about being just ahead of your story,  

while assuming responsibility for the entire telling,

all my life I’ve been waiting to come apart

between those twins of my tale, loose and bright

like a lamp relaxing into a room at twilight, 

see the whole space and its furnishings break free of their object, 

like you I will always lose my place in translations of love,

like you how joyous any sense of abnormal rings now

destructive, undying— 

robust and vast,  

your jet engine of heaven