Alysse Aallyn

Tag: #Poetry

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

    The Rose – Vulnerability –

      Sharing poetry is the most painful vulnerability. That was when I realized for the first time that pursuing life of art requires the warrior sensibility. You have to keep going, no matter what other people say and what they recommend. Some advice is good and some isn’t. We all need to develop our warrior instincts and our warrior sensibilities.

      Poetry is a language it takes a lifetime to learn to speak. Luckily, other people speak it! Back when I was a new mother for the first time, I advertised for poets and assembled a book of over 50 poems, representing over 40 poets from 26 states, writing about the experience of being female, and called it The Feathered Violin. We printed 450 copies and shared it widely, all around the country.

      In terms of sheer daring, this may have been one of the most daring things I’ve ever done!

      POETRY

      The world that seems to us so still


      And echoes no reflection of our will


      Somehow produced the seed that in us all


      Resurrected us from worm to fish, to crawl


      Upon the earth, to stand and then


      Return a child to creep and crawl again


      In some unending pattern, sane or not


      Judging by the brain that this same seed begot


      And yet within our every cell lies curled


      A revolutionary flag to be unfurled


      And lead us on to who knows what potential end


      Beyond the reach of enemy or friend?


      Can it be that simple balls of spinning glass


      Possess the strength to lift from this morass


      All that we are; though we don’t understand


      This torch we pass so tenderly from hand to hand?

    1. 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.