Jan '03 [Home] 12 Photo:  Christopher Gruver

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Red Zinnias Alice Notley           to George Schneeman Red velvet zinnias, small ones, across the room normal ones and that velvetness, so I don't even look at them I only think of them Red velvet. As in a song I wrote about a soul "red velvet love". There are also a fly and a feather, a large fly a giant, a small brown and brushy feather down on the floor What I need to explain is that like these things I am not human, part of me is not human Whatever I share with them, existence itself, is not human And isn't that a most important part the non-human part as in god the non-human That— That is so dark And so anyway to be human, or to be a feather And so constantly to counter darkness with red or softness or flyingness or sitting here Wondering why we humans are so obsessed with our humanness I might touch my cheek to the zinnias Would it be a cheek I used or would it be an existence Would it do here to talk about crimson or about velvet I've lost the book that tells about pigments crushed this or that gemstone or mineral ground insect husk Am I or are you like cochineal or is god Is god red That isn't what I mean Or velvet, like a spaniel or a certain light after rain Or fear-red like blood or not red but fearsome as blood-red is sometimes if you are surprised terrified by human nature Human nature Is plain nature terrifying? A thunderstorm or a mass murderer: is there majesty in a murderer Of course not Is god there The pre-storm sky is bruise purple It is so beautiful Is it beautiful because it is bruise-like because it is purple because it is brutal Brutal but not terribly harmful Purple and now so is the wind I run in it making my knee swell I don't care about my knee I don't have a knee inside the purple bruise wind. My knee is bruised inside, I am exultant I am non-human Who can bother to be bruised inside inside this timelessness Poised before the rain So many are Before the rain Who is like god then, or like a stone Who is like dark air or fire As god must be As you must be or I But not when bruised? And I am not running now Crimson from the kermes insect To see this color justifies being alive We all know that A friend of mine knows a painter, blind from birth, who knows this How does she see the crimson color? With a sense for that that guides her painting hand. Her works are very brightly colored very bold What is "bold" if you are a stone or a scorpion Do I want to be "bold"? A scorpion is exquisite Does it know this It is dangerous Does it know this? Does god know these things And if god doesn't know them are they things at all Are they "human" things of the sort I can take or leave And, oh yes, you don't think that a scorpion is exquisite armed and tailed and antennaed all arms like Shiva but walking walking on them tail up, the beautiful non-color of the scorched and pebbled gravelly browny ground, Fragile Who is that fragile A newborn baby Not really Why does such fragility persist in its ways? writing its poems for no one (or for its offspring, they say) If a flower is cut from a plant, can you make a bouquet of human arms? Is the flower the person or is the plant The plant What fucks us around so much as we do our non-human peers? The weather? Is love human or non-human I'd say non-human Why say that? I think anything loves Or do I think anything is love Why do I become so naked Who cares Well so I can cease to be human so I can be non-human by emptying it all out writhing under your scrutiny of my mind my pathetic mind when actually another part of me is as crimson, as velvet, or as darkness Darkness splashed with stars? darkness as in godhead Breathless naught Immortal naught The very immensity Have you perceived it? I sense it with an intellectual sense that is more like a sense than like thought I fear it I always have Why It might blind me with love It might rob me of my humanity, my sweet days and sad days What does the scorpion say Hot with desert love so happily small to sting Stings its self? We sting ourselves to stay small And human That crimson petals like cats' tongues perist behind my head leaves wilting I bought them partly for the freshness of the leaves as in a field, slave flowers Have you read Suetonius, if you can believe him How depraved the Caesars, next to a flower next to god? God is perfectly naive say the mystics and oneself is allowed in god to be perfectly naive again again as color or its lack is naive? by being essence If I could be red or blue As ultramarine as one's own painting Medieval people seemed to think god values best colors As pure color approaches the condition of the godhead? And gold as light But it is the blue or red we love so well Or the exalted sound of certain music without words But in poetry what is like that? To stammer love as only a human To make sliding music, between words, that one is barely aware of? In my words now I am in color Or in a forest drunk with it the air now more valuable than rubies than emeralds To breathe like an animal again Is that to breathe like god? Can you pretend to be the ocean or the sky? I can lose myself for a time Sometimes like darkness Sometimes like light Not exactly conscious as I and so equal oneself to the Holy Void and not like rock animal or blossom except in that darkness or lightness without braincase without hope Grain-of-wood alive aswirl As the red petals are for me I must be for them How can I? I just am As for the scorpion too (How is it for me?) The exquisiteness itself stings me like a star Beauty full of tiny wounds Where human-ness and god-ness collide And leak into each other Golden-dark acids Contrasting sweetnesses Coffee brown burning Crick in the neck When they say we exist to praise are they right, or just human, saying something fleeting Air becoming existence on time every day There is the scorpion materialized, mini-instant to mini-instant But it seems to me I am not always here My consciousness wanders and disappears through a hole in air into a coincident world Or void Where I am free Freely naught? On the wind Which is not breath Deeper red Darker red Black Not being here I am speaking Tongue of crimson A shower of coins might kill you but not red air Say it clear Are you boastful, boastful human? No I am not here To glimpse for a moment such immensity as all we know materializes from Who has the courage Leave your house of self It hasn't to do with a telescope It has to do with, not existing, to see Not existing In order to see it See it It isn't the stars It is more As you are nothing you are home As you are human you have a house of course A strange house Hermit crab? Or sea slime Any slime I am any slime I have an intellect It is gone I am now great as slime riding emptiness Vast blackness Are not the smaller older creatures greater than we are See how there is no barrier between them and god We have evolved to be distant from happiness? Have we evolved? I haven't ever I am not ever now Am bit of I-slime of happiness You must come back now and be human Why That is where color is Kindness and small loves No one else leaves for long while they live The zinnias' heads bend down drying today the one yellow one is like straw But time isn't daunting Our minds so much faster than our bodies can carry us to mindlessness timelessness again, if we want that Is flesh fascinating Is human history, that sick dream that's too slow? Yes, it's fascinating Admit it Attempted compression of an infinitude of immensities Another way in which the universe is so large I can't find it But I can't be lost inside anyone else How many red flowers are there Which one is myself, tall or short red or redder That is history Sickness of comparison That is human not floral or scorpionic So much more to watch and escape from Where can one go now And not abandon it Comfortable and not abandon it Nowhere you are here at X Anguish of an insect Immobility of a boulder Universe locked up inside one Locked up inside everyone Oh say it back to me Let me see it in your eyes and on your flesh The stars' reflections minor pinpoints in your darknesses As you carry bouquets of drying spice your own selves to each other I am the worst The worst flower locked The answer must be leaking back out Of what we know Until it's here God is not special Nor are you Nor is darkness Is something A momentary confirmation in time perhaps? The zinnias just so Ten drying heads the crimson deepening deepening in what is taken to be a death two still upright the rest are bowed-headed The green wilted with a grey sheen on the undersides showing twisted To make too much of a certain kind of telling I can still get lost in their color Though they are dying A rich female voice downstairs is singing something as fulsome as that red not of rubies but of rich cloths They still don't smell like the city This isn't that moment already Time I am it Each nuance of crimson corruption of what was once fresh and ignorant Nothing but oneself not a stranger, time And dark timelessness, too Mourn the zinnias now from the ancientest place of all And also from the second ancientest Mourn from timelessness From being time But they're just flowers And one of you cut them Tribal parochial human You own a scorpion in a paperweight Mounted starkly in a bubble Airless as timelessness itself Trying to make things last? Each time as if the last That must endure If you can find it Endure in memory? Endure from delineation's realization? 'I saw it So it is, really?' If I am time, aren't I its master? To be is to submit to it to being In the center of time is not a paperweight containing a preserved specimen gold against onyx black In the center of time is not a human, making, mind? But a love a scorpion's a flower's a rock's for configuring and then not I love you form for it I love you form I don't know I know this And I must not know One zinnia alive to sear as if a blackness in my chest The fallen leaves are fantastic shapes ungeometrical Curled up and greyed Unpredicted shapes Unpredictable 'I don't know what will happen to me' Does it matter It must One zinnia A dead star hung from a thread-thin curved stem Expired red burst star head What is a moment? Each 'just once' The Non-human holds it Releases it Are all the ways we are for each other Flower and scorpion Rock and fire Air and any, the holding and releasing hand, the non-human love? So that to press deep into one's darkness, one's god-ness is to find the world, by which I also mean the universe? The zinnias are gone I burst with crimson Stand up and do something human What is human Hardly anything Say something red [From Selected Poems (Talisman House, 1993). Reprinted with permission.] (Alice Notley is the author of twenty-five books of poetry, including, Disobedience (Penguin, 2001), awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Award. A long-time resident of Manhattan, she lives in Paris.) Woman with a Red Zinnia, Mary Cassatt (1891)