Rubies
by Alice Notley
rubies, remember? you had to
bleed awhile, then you
were changing and I’m changing how I
speak the gorgeous horrible suffering became —
after humiliation of not knowing how
to behave in your groups … the
rubies finally spoke and
told me who I was, in the forest
that was myself, Chaos the never
quite formed often ostracized, some-
times salaciously stroked by the salient
near the castle battlements
and keen-eyed malicious mynah birds.
But I knew I was everyone’s “heart” since
I felt not what you said was to be felt.
Perhaps I don’t feel. In my language
The Old, I pretend to be you so you might
listen. But I now know I only feel the
emotion of being your holder, the grave
and light the one who travels in place.
Saying the same as a sign that I am
being. The beautiful memory that befits
the one who has no shape or credo but, being,
repeats being. You shouldn’t have scorned or spurned me
since it is impossible to rid oneself of what there is only.
You keep asking for hope — you mean a formula
of words, for a board game or tale — you must
be in a tale! … Forget it forfeit your fatedness
and lose familiarity with fortune, known forms, and fallow fields of
friction, of wars you mostly watch, when you watch
along the wayside of the wounded limping
and the dead with substances flowing amid
flowers I think I could descend to despise
you but … I busy myself with lifting up
the dead to hold and hand to their ones gone before.
Come to this same place you can attain
now without blood. Do not despise me again
for you will be sore to see that you
eventually
enter through a small hole with stalagmites
and stalactites of blood ruby, the great hall
where you’ve always been anyway —
you will there find the song to sing of welcome
to my new self — Can you forget your old one?
Can you forget it Can you forget about fairness
and futility, humanity and humility — I who am memory
will help you forget everything but being here.