Four Poems

Rae Armantrout

PHRASING

1.

“Let’s really show the world

that we’re getting warmed up.”

A certain ambient

despair

washes the stomach gently.

“Let us disguise

eternity

as a survival

drama.

How will consciousness

be organized

when material grows scarce

after the death

of stars?”

Into flaps? Pulsations?

Shell-game urgency

of the news-hour.

What pumps to the surface

is all empty

circle-skirt,

a scalloped

white-pink thing.

The trick is to turn it

inside out?

2.

What are words for?

To be put in order,

time disentangled from space.

So when I get there,

there’s no one around—

just a phrase

somewhere,

hearing itself

think,

whistling up and down

its forecast

of a scale

while twigs make

minor adjustments.

“I’m in between

two states

and can’t be interrupted,

between two points

and can’t be found,

waylaid

OUR NATURE

The very flatness

of portraits

makes for nostalgia

in the connoisseur.

Here’s the latest

little lip of wave

to flatten

and spread thin.

Let’s say

it shows our recklessness,

our fast gun,

our self-consciousness

which was really

our infatuation

with our own fame,

our escapes,

the easy way

we’d blend in

with the peasantry,

our loyalty

to our old gang

from among whom

it was our nature

to be singled out

BOX

Pulling up to the minute,

think, “Mental detritus.”

Picking up speed,

the craze for useless crazes

is a joke about something—

but what?

Bird rides wire—

a probe

in the cold stir.

Falling asleep, I hear that

“only one hill works.”

We laugh

to accommodate death.

Dream someone’s placed me

in a red, plastic box

from which now I pop up,

clown-like,

into consciousness.

A time when we agree

the present does not exist,

has never existed.

Black puffs drift

in front of salmon smears—

sky going white beyond.

I’ll be called up

from moment to moment

to decide

what’s plausible.

It is terrible

to die—

but for a thought

not to be thought?

SOLID

1.

To produce the consistency of experience,

each night

the program toys with the idea

that the picture might be doctored:

it’s the false monster in the lake

known as George Washington.

What “lake?”

*

I submerge

because I enjoy

waking up,

arising

from chaos

bit by bit

again.

The “ness”

that is nothingness,

but seen from within.

2.

“Nude activists in Berkeley

find the law

has them covered.”

“Hero surfaces

from sunken sub,”

it says.

*

When we come back,

“Southern Exposure:

radiation leak

The Night

The Lights Went Out In Georgia.”

When we come back,

the murdered siblings

reappear

as trolls and elves.

When we come back,

the heir apparent

crafts

his solid victory