"April Not an Inventory but a Blizzard"

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 it is 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 Raquel 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 shood 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.

-Alice Notley