Alysse Aallyn

Tag: #Poetry

  • Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

    Wisdom –

      What is the difference between an old soul and a new soul? So many times, I saw the people around me choose suffering. I made a lot of idiotic choices in my life, but I never chose suffering. I graduated from suffering to sadness, and now I’m trying to graduate to compassion.

      Wisdom means seeing suffering coming and trying to get out of its way. It’s not always possible, and sometimes we just have to blast through it.

      A lot of my poems and stories are about ghosts. Ghosts describe the edge between the comprehensible and the impossible, between sadness and suffering, between guilt and gratitude.

      The deaths of pets are always traumatic for children, and I could even participate in the sadness of roadkill. I once tried to carry our cat Beautiful out to the road to see a dead cat, but, being an old soul, she did not want to come.

      When our family moved to Africa, I was eleven and had to leave our dog Four-Eyes, behind. I was haunted by his eyes for years and years. Every time I read the book The Cat That Went to Heaven I was in floods of tears.

      I asked a wise old man if animals went to heaven and he said, “Think how disappointed St. Francis would be if they don’t.” With a gush of relief I realized he was right – that wouldn’t be heaven for St. Francis. Or me.

      STICKS

      My dog
      Went on fetching sticks
      Long after it was dead.
      We’d find them on the stoop
      Arranged in patterns.
      Monk would sigh and say
      Poor old Four-Eyes
      Missing us. Still
      Playing people games

    1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

      The Sun – Truth –

        High school for me was a religious boarding school whose faculty asserted their monopoly on truth. I considered myself an honorable person and despised lies. So when asked straightforward questions, I told the truth and accepted my punishment. However, I gradually discovered that they reserved the right to lie to us and in fact, considered that “parental” and pedagogical. Was there any point telling “the truth” to such people? Apparently, truth was a scarce resource that I, at age 14, possessed. The hypocrisy was huge. My father loved the Society of Friends because creed was optional, attendance at meeting was voluntary and silent. No one spoke unless moved by the Holy Spirit. But at our school, religious attendance (we even had Vespers!) was mandatory and our captive audience was lectured from the Facing Bench (where the Important People sit.)

        In such a world, is truth possible? Is it even findable? Above all, is it communicable? I was naturally artistic, a bent which was discouraged because it was “self-indulgent”. And poetry (it’s poetry if the poet says it is) is the most self-indulgent of all. So that’s what I chose.

        PREPPY

        Corseted with verbs
        The French teacher sweeps
        The cherry blossoms from the tennis court
        As she would like to sweep
        The cherries, squelching them soundly
        Beneath soccer-spiked shoes

        While the headmistress
        Cello-breasted
        Polishes graffiti carved upon her coffin
        In Chaucerian High English
        And the girls –
        Nun-white, nun-blue

        Soar above hockey fields like
        Foul-mouthed angels, anticipated ecstasy locked
        In narrow hope chests ripened on
        Amphetamines
        Free Love
        Bad dreams.

      1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

        Synchronicity

        You could say I was a “success” at Circle in the Square, because I got the coveted ingénue part in the student production of Anouilh’s The Enchanted at The New Yorker Theatre. But I wasn’t happy. I thought I was as bad an actress as a dancer and it wasn’t gratifying because I wanted the story to be different. I wanted to be a writer! In fact, I felt I already WAS a writer. But I had absolutely nothing intelligent to say.

        How to get my inner development synchronized with my outer existence? In other words, develop a professional life. I did realize I needed a string of degrees – how coordinate that with my abhorrence of Higher Ed? Enroll at one of the Antioch College experimental schools – the one in Columbia, Md, for a degree in Creative Writing.

        Peacock Pavement: The Poet on her walk

        Femininity’s  Everests

        I climb them daily. Envy the crow’s

        wombless contentment

        As I stroll 

        among the old

        wrappers used

        condoms; joints rolled like French

        Letters used abused discarded.

        What the crow envies is my

        Zircon hair; a lunar map of freedom

        Battering-ram jaw 

        baroque nose, the

         Greek depths through which

        My eyes record their wanderings

        Outside the convent wall,

        The stalls, the chained-up lambs,

        The  leaf-clogged swimming pools.

        First act, second act, third act

        Epilogue. 

        Number days by seeking out

        Life’s taproot;

        Marking ages not my own;

        Investing in some future;

        All unknowing what anyone will make

        Of these

        Portentous Pleiades:

        disparate sisters

        Me, myself and I.

      2. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

        Inspiration –

        The desire to participate in the world of art hit me early. As a young teen, I was fascinated by the internecine struggles of the Trojan War and the Wars of the Roses. History was a family story, history was a crime story. Books for children – the Narnia stories, for example, couldn’t match the explosive, desperate sweep of historical intrigue. I had a facility with English that allowed me to “opt out” of language drills – I read the encyclopedia instead, which was full of improbable information. I loved reading to the class, and the class loved to have me read to them.

        When I entered boarding school at age 14 I really began to write in earnest. But the faculty did not like what I wrote. Moby Dick and the writings of John Steinbeck were seriously offered to me as models. This was the first moment I chose the Warrior Path. I complained that we were not reading any female authors and in fact, made a resolve never to read male authors again (I broke it for the Russians, who were feminine enough for me – especially Turgenev.) I liked Colette, so I read Francoise Sagan. I modeled myself on them – they were literally anathema at my school to such an extent that I decided not to go to college and pursued acting school instead.

        That was a dumb decision literally no one helped me with but by that time I had discarded The Appropriate Path to such an extent I don’t know if anyone could have reasoned me out of it since Adult World seemed so desperately stupid to me. What I chose – I thought – was the world of inspiration where magic could be created, second by second.

        PLAYING HIDE & SEEK IN THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

        Life class is

        My game – you started it.

        Now I’m too obvious –

        Resembling

        This swollen storehouse where

        nothing is explained.

        We are all

        Open to interpretation.

        Outside the tiny window a single tree

        Flowers in its smug

        Delusion.

        This whiteness weights

        my soul. I long for the whick

        of teeth on lip; and bite

        the bended elbow where the blood 

        lies gathered. Take responsibility 

        For unfinished work.

        Unsignatured because

        It never finished school. 

        No blood here, lady


        You must have

         Imagined it – a

         Powder burn without 

        A bullet.

      3. Testimony: a poem by Alysse Aallyn

        TESTIMONY

        In 1979 I borrowed a dime
        And stepped out in my party-dress
        To make a call.
        I’d need a cell phone now.
        A careless man said,
        “Find your own way home.”

        St Theresa cut in on our line –
        A sixteenth century nun pierced by light
        Reminded me while kneeling there
        To cut my anger with the sword of bliss
        And revel in the sacred music
        Anchor-less.

        I still seek among the faces
        Grief unstrung, listen to their emptiness
        Of joy undone
        Amidst the rage, the blindness and the fear;
        Recognize magnificence
        She told me would be there.

      4. The Controversy: a poem by Alysse Aallyn

        The Controversy

        In the bar we argue
        You drink gin and I drink bourbon
        You admit there’s something out there but
        God and Christ have been discredited
        You prefer the snake-faced aliens.

        Can pedagogues discredit learning
        I demand -Do rapists disgrace sex?
        Outside the blank-faced soldiers
        Breathing on the glass of history
        Await their time.

        They are glad to lend their bones
        As lumber. They’re afraid to live.
        Rebel children seize the city
        Experimenting on the damned.
        We’re trapped inside the hourglass

        Moving not in circles but in spirals –
        Moving somewhere.
        You order a stronger round
        I look inside my wallet
        To see what’s left.

      5. Constellations: Berenice’s Hair – a poem by Alysse Aallyn

        Constellations: Berenice’s Hair

        Meteoric dust drips ash
        Into my upturned mouth;
        I taste stars;
        What manner of being are you?
        I only know you’re something
        That I need. Your

        Mirrored endlessness partakes of
        Nothing human, yet suggests
        Completion. Your shadow arches
        Over everything, a lover who
        Won’t give satisfaction. I’ll take
        The expert titillation

        Of your neglect.
        Hunger burns so purely in
        This atmosphere. Without you
        I might be myself; with you
        I am nothing. But
        Deflation is a lover’s privilege.

      6. Constellation: Corvus the Crow; a poem by Alysse Aallyn

        CONSTELLATIONS: CORVUS, THE CROW

        This feathered dervish
        Is an endangered species,
        Always seeking center of the fire.
        Does he know what we don’t or
        Is he just trying to make us feel guilty?

        Iridescently decrescent he’s
        Always fighting someone else’s battles.
        He wins quite a few because
        Celestial wing’s always
        Quicker than the eye.

      7. Apus, Bird of Paradise; a poem by Alysse Aallyn

        I have seen the soul cave in
        Imploding; lens burnt hyaline
        Seen the wings upflung – God’s eagle
        Tesserae shagreen; seen
        The flare-tailed phoenix shuddering;
        Ripping orchid-breasted dream
        Splitting spleen and coil and lung into
        A shell of lies where
        Love and truth; meant and unmeant
        Polychromize.

      8. St Dorothy: a poem by Alysse Aallyn

        ST DOROTHY

        Who is this man
        Cruel mouth tipped like a cesspit
        To catch the unwary?

        It is the Roman Inquisitor
        Who takes flowers, accepts apples
        From the sunflower-faced girl.

        She tends her father’s gate
        They argue and
        He loses.

        He jokes but does not forget.
        They will meet again
        At the World’s End.