Alice Notely: The Beaded Horse

A small white horse from another planet wishes to talk to me.
It is only a few inches in length. Its skin is composed of white beads
White-beaded it speaks, hesitantly, in English
It has vocal chords. It has a pink mouth and tongue.
Heavenly seedpearls for horsehair? Try not to reach a rationale

Only to myself on welfare and in public: for I came to you
when you least expected new knowledge in your candled reality,
frying squash blossoms dipped in batter, on the courthouse lawn.
Leave this town. Oh one cannot go back on a planetary promise.

You never promised the earth your skeleton, it assumes it
I hate this cajoling universe, these passionate black-winged moths
telling my eyes to perceive nothing but their sisterly claws.

Can you find the Law in this town? An infidel possesses my voice.
Who are they to degrade me, they so easily imagined?
Only a dream could make them be of interest.

My sister the Fury had told me, I couldn’t get over heartbeat.
Or break she said heat of the orange rift, chimera of our alphabet
The girls fly screaming above the moving walkway.
Listen to the horsie—too white. You’re painting the walls of heaven
too white, says the African dropping his teacup I catch it

Where are you going? Anyone? Stop telling me things, staging events,
trying to focus on agreement, in our corner of this constriction,
room of no landscape and filthy apron. This is what I have against
heaven.

The desert of minutes remembers us well, so do We have to?
The people whose care was enslavement. Your drug addiction
in my kitchen? A haunting tenant plots to take over

a street gang in this afterlife; and her passivity and nicer still,
his manicure
flashes dutifully across the skies. I took a bullet for you.
We are the reminiscing convicts—One way or another, one would kill

that was our ideal. Our desperation, our incarnate bread.
Some people are called perverse for the audience’s pleasure.
I just don’t want to be here, though you have lovely qualities.
The horse isn’t of this nature, being magical
struggling to speak to us; hasn’t it come from its own revolutionary
land?

The superior man had said, Look at these white walls we’ve painted.
I can’t stay, I said,
I have a problem. Effects, he said. Yes, effects. Personal
and consequential. But we’ll meet in the living room again, to look
at the flawless drawings. I awoke and remembered my own priceless

art work was ruined. Where grace overdue doubts you
generations of satellites clank above the trees, bringing satisfaction
from the vacuous regions
Out of the dark confinement, out of the more moneyed arts.

The horse’s tiny tongue is working again
Twisted to shape you, tulip of assignment. It could be about
heroin or shamanism. I could sing your ravenous adherences
The woman was cut into three pieces, accompanied by successful
yields,
retrieval of indulgences, and a movie star’s penchant for charity.

Horse says they always promise to make it up to you in other ways.
For example as you grow old they’ll wipe your dribble with a tissue.
I speak as someone having trouble with a foreign language—Look
the girls are back! The Furies divebomb us shrieking.

You must accompany me to complete beauty.
Don’t return to the ugly projects, mount their stairs—
elevator danger. Heaven has always been characterized
by the gap between the rich and the poor. They
know how to rise. The oligarchs mean to be nice.
These are the figures of diction and the figures of thought.

An open-minded bird erupts from my forehead; we are going away
from lustful reversals and all ‘man’ has ever held dear. What’s there?
The same gibberish, customs, drugs? No way
It’s where the Law is clear. The silver malevolence
streaming down on the ocean was projected by realism, riches, psychic
vibrations of hierarchy. I am going for your heart.

I had wanted out but I kept returning for my purse, I tell the
horse, it contains my effects—have I left them this time?
Riding you away from the countries of age, are we the traveling souls
I’ve got to get there, do I need my passport,
my name, and everything I’ve done, to myself and everyone?

No, says the horse, not now, and No
ancient foibles, diaries, roulette, Greek drama. Orange malicious
boulevard
a diet of flames reflected on my white beads’
cadenzas: Hell brought us here. There was nothing to learn
by following rules: this is the Law. Clamorous beauty of courage

Sunflowers everywhere clotted black centers. The tremors
of your legs have ceased. No fear now, there was so much of it.
Those who are contrary to the old empire, you who hated have
arrived.

Heal more than one. We’ve arrived here with nothing,
not even what we thought of us. We are more deadly and savage,
more exalted than they’ve ever known;
Here we are the City, that indelicate miracle
not your manners or your children

did you really think you knew how to organize us
body after body, our deaths twisting in the wind? Here, in
our city, we don’t please anyone.

Out of the orange snow and the legality of disaffection; out of the
somber, broken crescent, and the overdue soul; out of the
streaming forelock
from our omniscient minds: this liquid dimension has awakened
out of barbary and stretchers.