Alice Notley wrote of pain in first
Person a half-century ago,
When she was near twenty-five years old.
But sometimes the passionate love is
Only the property of the ghost.
Love and passion aren’t properties
Of storms, for example, however
Humans like to figure them as storms,
Nor is pain. The chaos of a storm
Is regular by comparison,
At least averaging enough of them.
The big ones must form over water,
Where evaporative energies
Can build from warm waves, and must avoid
Any contact with the equator
Where the Coriolis effect dies.
Their different tracks remain similar,
And the ones that blow from Africa,
Once all mapped, one above the other,
Look like a cartographer’s painting
Of winds from a bell-cheeked, purse-lipped cloud
Drawn as if clouds had human faces.
But ghosts, conversely, such as the names
Given to those same cyclonic storms
Over different oceans, can’t agree
On anything. That’s passion for you,
Or love, or lust, or pain, or typhoon,
Or hurricane. Who knows what that is,
Or we are, or why so passionate?
Oh, give Alice Notley’s poem a rest.
She was so young when she wrote it, and
No doubt passionate, and we’re old ghosts.
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