Three Poems

Ann Lauterbach

FRAYED EDGES

Domain at hitherto causation    listening booth page

will show you who is right, has stood the test

anecdotal soul

à la carte

lay the blame on, bear the blame

Too late na na

new neighbors have arrived

in their slender

  that’s another pair of shoes, dead men’s shoes

they

have descended the ladder

to the philosopher’s hole, his

spider and butterfly and bird.

  Here find the linear broken below

a human form—

    hard shell of certainty,

parody and reverence braided together,

tiny beats of the heart—

traced back to that other plan

eternally existing

the young doing such a thing,

the big, what’s the big?

cabinet of curiosities, what

you may be looking at, unexplained.

Now I am newly sad although my house is fine:

a silver pencil, a distinction, a thing for him.

In the gap between sadnesses

a man is talking and I

will come, it is probably a shame

and you are a pattern of tact, come to deceive us, but I

I cannot the infinite

(as a child, no harm)

but I’ll try

  aloud, not guessing, I would have telephoned,

   thirty miles

much, well, highly

over what I have said, so

so thought

abraids first proof. This opinion flatters

no previous flourishing

no surefire procedure, as when

three into six gets two.

Five into five gets one.

The catastrophic interim is here

in the cold

foxglove, foxglove.

Against whose mercy shall I apply my wares?

Clarity pins us to our cause

as we walk down aisles of flameproof trees.

I am pointing at what is not there.

You are standing as close as a child

Let us show the cat a film of crows.

Explain

one of the limbs or organs by which the flight of a bird, bat, insect,

angel is

effected, part in, corresponding to,

supporting part,

and comes on the wind,

takes under, his are sprouting

high, low, and the north was added on the beat

which spread,

and the arrow with eagle feathers, the shaft and ambition

his spirit,

the steps, the horse, the god

and Victory, its way to its mate, the air

Explain

blue, brown,

of day, in the wind’s, right, left,

beam, mote, clap,

up to the, open, wipe,

throw, cast, hook,

glass, bath, cup,

bright, brow

Now the sky seems beautifully organized

but everything we care about is flawed.

The pool fills with leaves.

The funny pains of aging, artificial tears, and the false

verdict in the note,

drawing on her pride, her shame, her position

and step at the start, before the mirror,

without the medium, without coin,

despite the prophet

and the audience still waits for a voice from afar.

Out in the yard sparrows itch at the ground

and the grave flags flicker on their sticks.

In the coming years, you will find

a treasure,

favor and mercy, at the feet where there is no sense in it, although the

terms are reasonable. How do we

ourselves? We must take it, it pays, it pays,

almost impossible, but necessary

with time to read,

courage, heart,

                           one’s way

to where another is, crouching

under the day in a ghost file.

How bright the fence in sunlight!

And how acute the transformation, in which

a caterpiller becomes a butterfly

and what is really there becomes a jingle about Paradise

as a red car. The red car is really there

driving along the big streets

with the soprano singing her tune

and the young man with long black hair

smiling into the wind.

The crowd

behind the barricades, trying to see

suggests something,

   a fine blossom, pierces beneath things,

and that there is a reason in it, good

enough for an outward display. Why did he do it?

     To give it away, to give her what is enough,

and fair, to give it all away.

The price is merely a sweltering crypt

where drawings of saints,

Saint Paul and Saint Michael, Saint Peter, Saint Andrew, Saint Elmo, Saint Bartholomew, Saint David,

drip pink tears, and the two-note hum

in the dead of night

            na na. kap shus

    rr rr

     loo ahs             anpay              kistre

The churchgoers move inside, the chorus

in another room sounds victorious. Someone

drives by, blue canoe

strapped on, headed for the river.

The reverie begins again

near the silt path in front of the trailer.

People seem to need a reference

else the shore

is too far to be traversed. They want to know,

is it typical as well as indigenous,

is this an actual archival wound or repro,

spliced together by the magician

who would not have it, saying the living is in it, that it came to him free.

In a sliding scale

each thing refers to another,

scandal and code

fall together in a new font.

We cross the Bridge of Triage

swaying high over the river.

Down through the murk

a cluster of shapes, black

and dandelion yellow, swift by.

Today, at the House of Anemones,

a woman called herself mad.

She confused me, in her quiet barn.

I bought a bouquet of violent flowers.

The thing refuses its gospel.

The humped range is not shiny enough

to reflect instruction’s bliss,

the luminous arc dispersed without shelter.

Try climbing over yourself, try

breathing on the glass a valedictory kiss.

A dispatch of boys

made the water rise,

came forward roped into eddies, ripping

lilies as they came.

The Beautiful Writers

in downtown Shanghai

wear silver on their toes.

They study aphoristic slang.

The empty dress floats

toward the horses

galloping out from night’s tarnish.

Na na, theater of vigilance, graphic cloud.

Na na visceral digest, spitting birds.

Leave, yes, but to where?

Is Heaven? Did you read that? Are you going? Showed me they were, but does it touch our interests? Are you looking? Shall we, if prices fall now? I don’t know, to have is the sense of it, is the use of trying. Places they sing. I am weakest in facts. Your treasure. Go. You like it, send him. He will be taken care of, the ancients knew nothing, we know little. That’s it. Do you come from? Are you going? The whens are important.

Na na.

SPLENDOR

The dream ascends its microcosm, making not sense

and the atavistic goons clash

at the edge of the park, sky

sky plumed

all prepared

for the haunted bailiwick of strangers

trailing incognito across the past.

But the light seems musical, lowered

against the ridge

into andante

shift shift shift

News of earth: the fabulist knee-deep in mud,

fists of green, tinsel dripping by degrees,

shoe left in the meadow,

the sentence elongated and

patched onto the war zone.

It could be dark, theater of dark,

the unsheltered sentence bloodied,

the opaque moon, the glassed in record,

      the will to rise.

Call it the person things will go back to sleep

as if forgotten and the difficult will seem easy

walk into the light

  show the precarious stays

set off fires from above

there will be no one to count no two to include no three to beg for mercy

the trail of time will be easy to follow

good old oaks, billowing lilies along the roadside

no four to divide

the valley is incrementally cold

down up down down

mediated by the memoir’s fake torture

and the one-way war

panic of recognition

dangerous evident sun.

But in the slovenly small-eyed dream, surely

we are victorious,

our kisses stamped into wet clay,

our harrowing ended in song.

Rah! Rah!

as the struts of tomorrow fall to ground

and tears arrive from afar in new boxes.

INTERLEAVINGS (Paul Celan)

Snowfall, denser and denser,

a knight’s breath

Snowfall, as if even now you were sleeping.

A collar of cold at his neck

above it, endless,

a foreign sky.

Below, hidden,

where my hand held the soft stuff

was den Augen so

prone, entire

almost fetched home into its

delay, the cast-off limb

posted.

The watch and music

in twin branches:

what body falls through the bridal mass?

is the colored cloth a flag?