April Not an Inventory but a Blizzard by Alice Notley

I met Ted at two parties at the same house
at the first he insulted me because, he said later
he was mad at girls that night; at the second we danced
an elaborate fox-trot with dipping--he had once taken one lesson
at an Arthur Murray's.  First I went into an empty
room and waited for him to follow me.  I liked the way
his poems looked on the page open but delicately arranged.

I like him because he's funny he talks more like
me than like books or words:  he likes my knowledge and
accepts its sources.  I know that there are Channel swimmers
and that they keep warm with grease because of
an Esther Williams movie.  We differ as to what kind
of grease I suggest bacon he says it's bear
really in the movie it was dark brown like grease from a car
Who's ever greased a car?  Not him I find he prefers to white out
all the speech balloons in a Tarzan comic
and print in new words for the characters.  Do you want
to do some?  he says--No--We go to a movie where Rachel Welch
and Jim Brown are Mexican revolutionaries I make him
laugh he says something about a turning point in the plot
Do you mean, I say, when she said We should have keeled him long ago?
Finally a man knows that I'm being funny

He's eleven years older than me and takes pills
I take some a few months later and write
I think it's eighty-three poems I forget about Plath and James Wright
he warns me   about pills in a slantwise way See this
nose? he says, It's the ruins of civilization
I notice some broken capillaries who cares

I wonder who I am now myself though I haven't
anticipated me entirely I have such an appetite
to write not to live I'm certainly living quity fully
We're good together he says because we can be like
little boy and little girl I give him much later a
girl's cheap Dutch brooch Delft blue and white
a girl and a boy holding hands and windmills
But now it's summer in Iowa City he leaves for
Europe gives me the key to his library stored
in a room at The Writer's Workshop
I write mildly yet oh there's a phrase "the Gilbert curve"
how a street turns that sensation to make it permanent
a daily transition as the curve opens and is walked on
of the kinds of experience still in between the ones
talked about in literature and even in Ted's library
which finally makes poetry possible for me but I've
not read a voice like my own like my own voice will be

--from Mysteries of Small Houses by Alice Notley