Dark Archive 9780520948259

Table of contents :
System
Acknowledgments
Cloud Cover
Turn
Troposphere
Evaporation / Condensation

Citation preview

Dark Archive

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L au r a M u l l en

Dark Archive

University of California Press

Berkeley Los Angeles London

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2011 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mullen, Laura, 1958– Dark Archive / Laura Mullen. p. cm. — (New California poetry ; 32) isbn 978-0-520-26886-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Title. ps3563.u3955d37 2011 811'.54—dc22

2010032588

Manufactured in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

11

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

for Carol Snow

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“The wind seized our breath. The Lake was rough.”

Dorothy Wordsworth: Jour nals, April 15th, 1802

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System

xiii

Acknowledgments

Cloud Cover 3

window / candle

5

No Voice

6

In the Space between Words Begin

8

Remediation Attempt

9

I Wandered Networks like a Cloud

10

The Author Is Not

12

I Wandered (Phony) As

13

By and By

15

Little Landscape

16

I Wandered Her Voice

18

The Proofs Arrive

20

As

21

Stratocumulus

23

Prose Poem

25

White Box

29

Original Material

32

Studying Clouds (A Trick of the Light)

33

Parts of Speech

35

Sound Barrier

37

Cloud as Lonely

39

Images, Similes, Some Alliteration

41

Collide and Coalesce

43

Code

45

The White Box of Mirror Dissolved Is Not Singular

47

Passages

Turn 53

If

54

TURN

55 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 66 69 71 72 73 74 75 76 79

OWN STRING A POOL POOLS IN YOU INSIDE WREST WORD CLOUD NO ON COINAGE EX SELF EXPANSION EXPANSION WILDERNESS HERE MATTER EAST LAST TRUTH HOUSE MATERIALS PUBLICITY TRUTH END POLIS IS SPACE SAME SAME NAME CRIME EXAMPLE AMERICA INTERPRETING TURNING THINGS UTTER UTTERLY

Troposphere

129

83

Pass

84

Cloud Seeding: From a Journal

86

The Visual World behind My Head

88

Virga

89

Orographic

91

(Stratus) Endlessness

92

Cloud Money

98

Message

100

Daisies

102

On a Clear Day

104

Love (Stratus)

104

Love (Stratus Opacus)

106

Love (Opacus)

107

Love (Scud)

108

Edge of There

109

Love (Altocumulus Translucidus & Altostratus Opacus)

110

Desire

111

(Pieces from the Broken Roof of an Abandoned Passage)

113

After-Image (Louisiana Company)

115

Spoke of a Blueprint

118

Should Have Ended

120

The Motif Modifies Space

125

Even in My Dreams the Knowledge

126

Ghost Mist

Evaporation / Condensation

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to the editors of the following journals, in which some of these poems previously appeared: American Letters and Commentary, Caffeine Destiny, The Colorado Review, The Corpse, Barrow Street, Bayou, Bomb, The Denver Quarterly, Free Verse, Mandorla, Marginalia, MiPoesis, New American Writing, 1913, Octopus, Ping Pong, Upstairs at Duroc, and Van Gogh’s Ear. Also to Victoria Brockmeier’s dove | tail press for the chapbook Turn and to Douglas Messerli for including “Passages” in the Project for Innovative Poetry, as well as to Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg for the appearance of “Daisies” in the anthology Starting Today. An alternate version of “Evaporation . . .” and some of the takes on Wordsworth’s poem appeared in “I’ ll Drown My Book”: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press). I am very grateful to the Louisiana Board of Regents (through the Board of Regents Support Fund) for the ATLAS grant (LEQSF[200607]-RD-ATL-07) that gave me time to work on this book.

xiii

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Cloud Cover

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window / candle

this light that looks like lightning outside is inside sputtering dance of tattered flame in a draft between doors knot of wick softening wall of wax it’s not that “I don’t understand why you had to be taken from us” but any act of “understanding” turns back halted at reflecting glass to my need for meaning in this life clouds in a window scud by seemingly flashing dark and bright guttering sky my brief 3

vision of the worlds that with you go out the light drowned in its own         fuel a little smoke this glaucous spill of cooling wax wisps of almost opaque air         blown past

4

No Voice

Wandered lonely in the voice of another who had no voice This is what I remember Two figures by the water’s edge, stopped by such beauty, one numbers The complaints travel the body stop nowhere never stop are always Later by an open window notebook open “This is what I remember . . .” Who had no voice she said, still, but I wonder how you are I wandered like “like” refusing the information I wandered, realizing I hadn’t mourned, and that I would still

5

In the Space between Words Begin

In the space between words begin Attempt In the space At dawn the newly risen dead uncomfortable In their restored bodies Situation: from ‘wandering’ to rest— Loneliness to solitude. Believing Is seeing, experience An accrual of images The newly risen dead find their bodies Uncooperative, awkward, ugly as in any Horror flick I wandered lonely as a van full of hippies In Texas In the space between words “what shall I talk about”

roots

Situation: a man at his desk pages through Another’s writing closes his eyes seeks rhymes For the following: daffodils, thought . . . I fear I can no longer think I fear I am no longer that which thinks Or that a certain kind of thinking’s lost

6

Light, light, light, light. Let there be a place From which a way seems clear or clearer Out of the house into the golden And never

7

Remediation Attempt (winter 2005 lower 9th ward)

signs gone streetlights people lines between inside and out destroyed in the flood the word destroy with troy in it letters of a word lonely meaning stopped starts sounds the decision to use a frame of time to inhabit it habit like going to the wall where the mirror was expecting to see yourself seeing the wall (if that’s all) recalled lines between house and yard yard and street lost my house your house his her their our high green weeds surround an isolated concrete stoop in what’s left remember membrane this blurred view through swaying cut plastic makes a room within the stripped room containing dust promising to continue but this respirator she was holding it out there’s something wrong with it

8

I Wandered Networks like a Cloud

That floated o’er my couch, remote In one hand, drink in the other, as a crowd On the screen (frightened, enraged) Fled the tanks beneath the leaves Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine, These wars, these displaced “refugees,” Filmed in never-ending lines Along the margins and at bay. Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Hurrying nowhere, like worried ants. The waves beside them danced; but they Bent weeping over loved bodies: A poet could not but be gay, Far from such desperate company: I gazed—and gazed—but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that satellite dish Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, To channel surf the world’s ills.

9

The Author Is Not

Dead the author is a closed Account occluding you Clued in or out another One and only clouding Ground as stony as an autre Clod the author’s nothing But another method Aloud to be allowed ssssh he Billows up wherever we Might see too many meanings Crowding round about a shroud Is not afraid of making a sound The author is not lonely as a cad As arias the areas of air we are arise To spin within convention Centers’ centers cannot hold The hell of whole untolled And where an urgent surge Of suggestion floods the subject With reflections sssssh he is still Turning the town upside down Adrift in the riffs these rifts Allow so if a reader running Aground on the drowned sounds A thunder or dunderhead underStand my numbered superfund Friends it’s only an end to an end

10

Where a mind “wanders” the author’s Already in his head a recollected Glance back over a salt’s shoulder Where chances a roof to dance On the golden waves of the wake Of departure the other Are a crowd Not disappeared just disavowed In case you wondered

11

I Wandered (Phony) As

Far as the local authorities let me On the tightly lashed leash Of this look and leave Policy; lonely As a clown . . .

12

By and By

The necessity or so it seems of forcing A shape on these of saying like Of saying see what I see see What I ask you to see Seeing How far you’ll go with or on what grounds we Already that shape is dissolving Already that shape Already another very like a wail Seeing How far we might Impose a particular vision on what actually clear lifted curve of syllable churning back down into sound sounding It out is it like Meaning are you like Do you like me

13

at once everything goes false with the speed of the flash revealing we’ve been at the beautiful and brilliant party eating maggots among the rotting corpses laughing I thought so all along I told you so I suspected as much doesn’t save either of To find in formlessness a form and name and find a friend beside you in that Naming momentarily so often a face at first sight “it looks like . . .” forced categories coming into existence after the invention of photography stilled proof of the moving moments caught at last caught at last what shall we call these then and then and then How account for the alternate versions already veering

14

Little Landscape (spring 2006 lower 9th ward)

got out where the road went under wind-rippled clouds by the field where the storm-tossed barge crushed the houses beautiful hyphenated word “storm-tossed” clean bright arc down the rusted hull cutting it into what could be shifted in pieces the conveyance here a tent of azure plastic there someone’s roof on the ground someone’s boat on a roof and mashed car piled on car crushed torn split ruined structures past tense damaged stilled as adjectives the highly toxic air articulate syllables shapes a mind might construct of and for an encounter bits of blue sky shiver between clouds caught in up-thrust edges of shattered asphalt telephone poles tilt splintered off midair bearing posters If you saw the levee break in the weedy rubble a heap of blue and white disposable coveralls beside the neat line of black rubber boots soaking in bleach in silence

15

I Wandered Her Voice (retrospectre mix)

Floats on high Almost crying

though much of what constitutes the present (what wealth) should be read (Undulating landscape “rolling hills” beside her take) closely even interrogated, When all at once (at once part of his elaborate math: singular gaze In tension against the mass or) crowd [I saw] (revision) Host the device a little fast or slow a slur or skipping A cricket owns the world / Plays legs and face / Plays every last Possible cover version Close to the lake, under the table, All summer, dreaming of surviving It could be self-pity, the tape Fluttering and dancing Continuous loop margin the parable My past your past our impossible Insect-sized life, actually Never-ending Sudden lurch of sound (How lonely altocumulus?) Plays

No one else Version after version hurrying. Off to the dance, n’est-ce pas? Oh, but it’s so Late! Last (fake Bliss) chance! Sister as mist Numbers nothing, reminds us she was accompanied, sees the blossoms Some lying down, resting “as if for weariness,” whose dream What ‘progress’ impossible having 16

Waved away these visions of other

“Late” One step forward two steps

Dancers frozen posed Out-done out of it Waves When on my completely transparent goes by right

Recording and then What wealth And then Cortege of My heart

Only This show

The surface itself in places removed by the force

17

The Proofs Arrive (“starts” instead of stars)

Somewhere between a dark cobalt and a light manganese A strip of her torn backpack by “the drag marks” at the edge Of the trail In a journal brought down from the attic the single line She copied out “Why bother to send it at all . . .” And then her own poem in response Who seemed to think the doubts were hers alone (I cannot correct that impression)

(now)

Rewrote “stars” thinking it should have ended “And been erased.” No further explanations Should’ve ended Earlier, before “Imagined”—these meaningless squiggles a word Another word What does it matter . . . Stopped Starting to imagine the nights as they were 8/1—8/15/05 in the “wilderness Area” cold and clear. The glittering sky and her constellating Her pattern-attentive, her meaning-seeking imagination Sharp edges of stones under the trail map shifted Letters, adding angles, sometimes the pressure Showing she tried to make sure. Words that seemed clear Enough once were now hard to make out. Teetered Into other significances, destinations. No, I said, here. . . . Who would have seen the connection immediately That much is clear. Over the rise came—8/26/05— Those who would have it by heart. Stacked shards At the head of that black greasy stain on the stones of the trail.

18

Proof a cloying foetor and her view of sky blue sky suddenly Recalled laughter. Should have ended “Would have hovered In the air”? Fearless and alone up there (we drove for hours) Or the unfinished floor of the attic (which had to be emptied) treacherous As love itself suggests itself a gesture Why bother She should have died hereafter . . . The empty canvas set down in a clearing (Dear It would have been easy to fall, the detective explained, a single Stone shifting could have led to the shattered ankle she bound In strips of torn backpack (azure, scattered) a paintbrush as splint Of the dream I recounted she’d say, “I can’t believe how much you remember!” The heavy box of “ashes” Maybe even earlier: on, “dead leaves and shards.” Nearly two weeks of willed survival, hoping to be discovered. Living on nothing. Suspended color

19

As

Clouds as where to look for what’s gone atmosphere as closet or box or vault sky as hiding place ice as silent partner in the crime clouds as what gets tossed aside in the search sphere full of not this not this not this turning in on itself the churning self-distrust a depression at first then what did I do with it what did I didn’t write this the wind wrote it the storm surge wrote it out scattered and flat on pieces of trash blown back on the edges of the parking lot as the buses depart and depart too late Texas is where in the wide galaxy you call from you try calling from you keep trying one big busy signal this vast landscape of broken and solid lines worn off worn asphalt beep beep beep the soft white shapes of the crumpled paperwork shift in the sky the fragment I’m sorry I can’t the sentence I’m sorry I can’t help you deep space of deadlines and the extent of the damage loss the names of the lost sky of laws and ordinances I’m sorry clouds as only the enforcement only the only itself lifted up to reveal nothing again and again nothing passing across and through

20

Stratocumulus

An endlessly reproduced “voice” Ghosts surface after surface Product of the product Of the “impressions of space” Stratocumulus you think You might reach in and Wring them of light or light A future by these brief Attachments A cloud like a citation like Some essential duplicity Skim reimburse That haunting sense I could—by eavesdropping & eavesdropping only— learn at last the truth being kept from me susurration behind this wall that shut window’s pulled shade the closed door muted truth my existence would damage or destroy I bent to intent wanting to be close enough to know finally not to halt by my presence someone must at last admit dissipates “Endlessly” a voice repeats Ghosts coordinates crossed

off

A disturbed chaotic sky A transitional form from a study Reach in like lights Oh so that’s what

21

Never was wasn’t was this emptiness (rough) Clued me in (retaining wall) (again)(st) Their allusion the conditional in what Hopeless vanished spoke Sad cloud Oh no

22

that’s science

Prose Poem (slight grit of the passage of what?)

The moments stuck as they are whether you survive them or not if stuck is what I mean to say when I mean to say memory’s already revising it whatever it once . . . —to survive is to revise. These slight adjustments. If you can— dusting the page off—survive that. Away what is it you see when you say the word away. Distant music drowning out the voice of the woman saying the house was nearly destroyed in the flood and then the abandoned houses on either side were burned down and now the neighborhood itself is not . . . and the song ends. Little spatter of applause and the band leader repeats the name of the band in case we just got there and the title of the next song. “That’s what happened” is a simple phrase in which something complicated happens or many complicated things are happening: there’s the truth claim as well as the stepping away from same and the wave toward objectivity or a more comfortably shared frame of reference. Note the absence of the “I.” The passive voice stacks words as a wall feigning a moment of calm insisting the eye of the storm is the end of the storm. The sand shifts and the line vanishes. Who here has been truly alone with the facts? One aspect of a certain kind of suspense situation is the problem of being the only one who knows and the site of a potential seepage of knowledge that must be dammed off: when someone announces they know who the murderer is but can’t tell you yet you know they’ll be dead in the next . . . they’ll be next. If you know what you are not supposed to know you must be killed isolated or ridiculed and if you fear you are headed toward that kind of knowledge you must protect yourself shelving the book closing the door on the ringing phone tossing the letter unopened onto the fire. Saying I don’t think I want to hear this. When the levee breaks mama you got to That’s what happened and then “shit happens,” shifting westward into a distance opened by absence as this fuliginous grit swirls down on the page a little blizzard of something dust ash the shed skin of scrofulous time in its passage rubbing off on everything that doesn’t flee equally fast. Blow on the traces rub the 23

hand holding the pen over the page once using the soft edge of your almost fist keeping the pen high not to leave a mark but to erase these scattered bits of what almost look like . . . except they come off. Except they are illegible avow it brushing them off as if to make the last suggestion disappear just go away where is away I was more than a little in love with

24

White Box (notes)

Object: tiny white box the size of a sugar cube, White outside like a sugar cube white like like Easily mistaken for a sugar cube, placed in a bowl full of white Sugar cubes after being first touched with glue and then rolled in white Sugar (Domino brand) and allowed to dry thoroughly. Hole Barely larger than a pin prick on one surface Inside: A) your own eye reflected shadow upside down B) smear of cloud [all I love] C) three words Wandered lonely as White box to be dissolved Behind the bars A song or show not mine snowing Our representative Having broken the thermometer Holds out a ball of mercury in one slightly shaking hand Disintegrates sheared off By wind to reveal the thread-like textures ■

It’s the worked surface that has remained—despite the obvious intention and effort—both illegible and ‘white’ or blank insofar as we understand that space to be empty. Suggestive of sky, but otherwise unfinished: commentary

25

on attention. What seems not to exist because we aren’t willing to attend to or allow for its actual situation? The journalist sticks the microphone up to the face of the grief-struck friend who speaks directly to the vanished as if the dead became the TV audience: “Our thoughts are with you . . .” ■

The little white boxes referred to as doves as clouds as “little white boxes” rarely, If ever, discussed in the same breath with sugar cubes Sweet, aren’t they? Having experimented with the representation Tilted plane picture plane window candle cloud mirror shade Under the pale grit of the surface faint lines Fallen pine needles under fallen snow under more recently More or less clear caught instances Slant reference or rather comparison loves doves Stanzas little white Boxes of ash poem columbarium Restless flutter from place to place looking for what Glittery plane Passing Boxes of moonlight

reference

suggestions

as if light were lent existence

“Open the box the words inside the box open the box” (Carol Snow): the sense of the thing through the words for not ‘in’ so there is no—despite the opening—way to release. Already these cubes are a little more worn, a little less white. Heaped into that cage for crickets, a sort of icebox. What if you 26

could arrange to meet someone who had died (what gate is this, colorless). Paler figure and lighter ground: shapes so abstracted the subject is the (shifting) relationship itself Not, as tongued out, covered with sugar but broken glass. Crushed to a fine dust. Ground This sky

so long

nothing

She is almost as real to me as she was Immense circular smear

she neither feels nor sees livid

powdery

■

Then drink the ink that is your cage, singing insect, representative. Is that true turns into is that possible. Suddenly I was alone with some things: what I was swallowing the material; gradually what I was saying what I was saying. Finally let them dissolve: in each a letter left in a box of dust to be lost among similar compartments. Communicating through a torn throat dark thick blood choking breath. White box. “At last I’m home and have time . . . ,” I wrote on the postcard she wouldn’t . . . the words won’t reach her. ■

The right hand like some kind of cloud floats above the rest of the prone figure He’s lying on the couch again rewinding that movie A puffy glove of cumulonimbus wavers at the end of a sinuous ribbon of arm straying away

27

The head is somewhat swollen the eyes, worried, checking the set Rolling in the palm of the other hand a silver ball, liquid, heavy To be in the megaplex of popcorn-scented tranquility watching things blow up in safety “What am I doing here, dressed in these clothes, writing ‘poetry’?” one character poses Like I’ve never been to the Lake District Murky water rises under this vacant or pensive mood and he lies Still as if nothing were happening not asleep just “concentrating” One hand dominates slowly closing From each outstretched finger of the other suspended Drop-shaped drops distorted reflections of light from the screen One huge white fist turning in the gulf Golden Hummer out of which two white guys descend in yellow slickers at the storm’s start, leaping up into the 110 mph wind to see how far it will blow them, laughing; “in such jocund company” Cuts back to the looped track of the wide grind Eyewall making landfall

28

Original Material

the dream of loosening the relationship to things already said wellfoundered phrases on which I am dependent floating quoted in or out of context seemingly complete my friends loosening the relationship I wandered lonely as my friends countrymen ladles and germs colorless green theories of leisure lending your tears to this failure of barriers pour over and under the system listen in the words give me your tired your poor do you hear slave labor unearthed to be announced as buried gems and stratagems of verse or vice versa beat beat little birdless wings sign in the air for an ardent gaze at a page gone somewhere loosen the drummed-in dream of freedom to repeat in my country’s only language lost memory of day shifts risk until at last I’m only pretending I’m pretending it’s all me others’ structures finished off give a certain polish to my rough phrases for true or to prove something move us echoing as they do some Edenic instance of perfect understanding citizens hacking a way out through the attic not ever again to be referred to as refugees O you euphemisms come with me

29

kinship and legitimacy you know you know the story why don’t you sign something for the love of a little action, a touch of lights and these agreed upon markings in the ether make us aware of a disturbance in the mirror-like ahem surface to remind us we do and do not step into the same whatever better little bits of proscenium appeared in the glitter as we talked here and there or rather staged our culture our shared affair tortured into the area of interest the expected answer the dream of loosening making lonely a relationship to identity an architecture nothing but guy wires reverent reference less what’s said than who said it first the production of papers placed onstage stiff if adored and more than slightly awkward in her borrowed robes who isn’t here my dear the producer’s whore a sore subject bored by these fragments shored against some fear mine or yours ah let’s say ours that is a fear I think it’s safe to say we share or in the immortal words of the board of bard-brained supervisors of the immortal army corps of engineers copter in some seemingly endless throat clearing hear 30

here let me make one thing perfectly far a slit bit in the either or lightens the load of a white permissions hunter mission a flicker of victory fingers lifted over the ever unfinished no no those scare quotes note a distance from our doxa’s noxious matter got by rote and to the letter in another’s patter for another cipher toy or pricey hot lecture neither are those flowing words my own nor is this weather

31

Studying Clouds (A Trick of the Light)

Composed of minute water droplets And cancelled checks the “page Left blank intentionally” the casual Promise to call or hours in which Talking becomes something other People are good at Blurred by The cheapest booze a the her Voice “We’ll sell it all” echoes The dream of selling it all Next To the symbols the abbreviations Tending to produce threatening Skies forms which echo the land Below them Heirlooms A time Problem the immediate need For nothing Contour map of A yard full of personal items Each translated meaning Own Memory Unceasing ragged vague Symphonic roaring freeway near Sound and far Usually they do not Merge with other clouds a description Follows And after that was gone And after that was gone something Else the vow to live on nothing Or “for a song” Traced outlines point In the direction of the prevailing

32

Parts of Speech Before we could paint the house we had to scrape off the old paint.

I have written a mystery no I think it is more of a plural autobiography I have brought an umbrella no I’m afraid I have left a sewing machine In this site to be formed irregularly to be a collective noun then S then P Is that a creature in your hand are those the parts of speech? I have knitted a laboratory no I believe it is more like a filmed chain mystery (Where are you standing when you say I mean saw these things?) I have brought you a theory no I’m not sure but we may need to distribute Person Place Thing Idea the jury still deliberating It all happened on the same day he said and settled down on cue to some highly crafted reminiscing child corner piano religion piano children corner religion Piano instruction / corner a verb Religion money fame The film followed a herd of cows through a typical day. She probably has more self-confidence than my other friends. The returning astronauts waved to the cheering crowd. The question after can you tell us about that day the phone rang right in the middle of reading when he died “It’s for you” and what I recognized later as theme music hold he never finishes sadness sad to say saying The principle congratulated the class on its performance. The dodo is an extinct bird. To be plural and formed by adding. For example Oh we’re going to have so much fun can I my wife by then everyone but brought together to tell them three hours on the phone with my agent rewrite it of course the advance open on the floor beside his bed complaining of a headache early he said crumbling like sand and slipping away all Said books paints creatures sounds chained films sounded filmed chains To be a scrap a piece of a lesson lifted on the wind to be lost and found Before we could paint the house we had to scrape off the old paint. 33

The eerie music during the play added an atmosphere of history. When the chain fell off her bicycle, she heard a terrible grating representation Of democracy. I usually don’t like spicy disbelief but when the senators appeared To dissipate about that day the call came can you wring I have written a typical feature no I imagine it’s more of a world safe for a single Page Jolan Phin class 2nd and 9th 8.23.04 edge of another storm needing More words for kinds of rain beginning To be the jury arguing loudly This laboratory (the audience) formed. Per Write three sentences about a concert or other performance you have seen. Use at least three collective nouns in your sentences. “Well I didn’t really go to a concert. I seen a vietnamese singer sang last year at our church. She was pretty. She sang alright It was fun I guess” I’m a Singer it’s raining

34

Sound Barrier

Should move the performance forward resisting arrest best Ringtone ever “should— it’s where shall hits the wall” West of the west Should inform the forward commander moved to call off a pre-test Should move (blank space on the page to indicate gated community) Everything a little blurry “well your eyes are tired” just Give it a rest Should perform pro forma “should— it’s like ‘shelved’ and ‘could’ shoved together” Shoulda been there Yo bro yr tazer (line breaks to indicate failing infrastructure) “In a blender” that’s the breaks breaks off in the middle of a call should Perform the movement

35

backward (prose to index) (roof buckled porch covered with rather neat and thoughtful language okay graffiti in green pen. “Bottom Life” and the verb “Free” in front of various names: “Tyrone,” “Jeff,” “Lee,” “Chris” . . . ) “You can’t be sure what kind of people . . .” code for the cold certainty of the speaker’s unkindness Should’ve reformed should’ve been a reformer fast forward to assist the quest Blinking rapidly (title to indicate lack) look Leaping around the room to make the cracked glass in the windows tick and the warped floor shudder Had been standing too long too near the speakers a churning senseless war in our ears Pressure Contender Said coulda been coulda you yeah you with the cell held like a shell to your Everything as if under water Hello whoever you shill for tell them by the time you get here I’ll be a number

36

Cloud as Lonely

And verb with the nouns, and my Sullen heart and the bliss of The eerily violent Description of memory as a sort of IED In the home entertainment center Are you in an adjective or pensive mood When I lie Following me sick of the mention of flowers the stench of flowers when for the dead What bailout the show had Pronoun verb—conjunction verb—and little thought Such a company could not be But that the cost of this Out-did the sparkling waves: Waves beside them but they Displaced the local industry Tossing their heads Storyboard it: do you see them casting Their heads into the air or to each other Just asking (do you follow) Shadowed the man describing a live section of landscape his pretense he’d been there Alone the main thing

37

Did you see me dreaming this? (On your inward eye?) “If you’re reading this” Oddly specific number weird syntax torqued For the rhyme’s sake along the margin of A never-ending line Anyway continuous as Wither darkened number Line about motion and location as cause Gerund and gerund in the breeze Preposition the noun preposition the noun Verb location and preposition nouns When all at once I saw a host golden

38

Images, Similes, Some Alliteration (late fall 2005 holy cross)

Someone here somewhere hammering Sound loud in the emptiness Askew at the curb pieces of swollen furniture Crumbling chunks of mud-stained interior walls Haphazard

belongings

Silted streets buckled and blocked Sky blue sky details Constricted signal isolated sound Boat smashed down on a house Silence October a single hammer Tap tap tap like a spirit knocking Details Cloud to somehow Flushed from high weeds a small scared cat Flashes off Boat on that house aground as if The roof were a reef Steeple aslant in the churchyard Houses open to air Someone on a ladder nailing something Back where it was before

39

High green weeds already in the cracked slab Tap tap tap

taptap

Flapping loose edge of an azure tarp Like the wing of a bird in a trap

40

Collide and Coalesce

Loans newer Loans renew Ensnare low Loners anew Laws none re We lorn sane Lane owners Learn news O New lanes or Lean owners Ensnarl owe New lorn sea Or lawn seen Near slew no Woe ensnarl Loners anew Worsen lane Sown leaner Loner wanes Ran low seen Lean news or Lear sewn on Lear on news No real news An eel sworn One war lens Seal renown Sneer no law New loser an 41

Real sewn on Slew Reno an Lone answer Reel was nonRenewal son Loners new a No we learns New Orleans

42

Code

S-wings into the light, a swallow in the hall, and out as in over. The context’s high flutter: the roof of the mouth, the mouth of the river. Roll me over the fluviometer, allowed to doubt the door closed on a loud (and how) cloud cover. Here’s a bout with about without much of a boat—not to crowd or crow over—but to gloss a glance at the wards (back to for) as key to a wouldbe warder. Beloved but not a louver. Given our driven and cloven hearts, better hoof it when the storm hovers. Just go. Or come to know the shower from the show glowing lower, after after. Riveting Dada data into yada yada or featherweight father patter, bright assurances slur past disaster. Just a matter of being in clover: light on your feet (on the water), numb to number. Luck’s all in a row for the rower still towing the two towers, that fist mover, arriving to rev here his motto motor: heck of a heck of a huckster. Stir that into y’at dat dat dat, back at it: at at. Up to downriver to undo the fluent liar oiling our troubled slaughter. He’d have us dotting the eyes of a storm of forms until ill but we’ll not sew to sewer more saltwater waves we wavers. See underwater and also under Under. Rum numbers, numb members. Another bad dad had by hurt, another bird in the band flown like water. A shroud of cloud tears to show how slow clowning around drowns distrusted intelligence out, like, it’s all in your head (waters). Blurred word in these submerged streets: bad weather for bed wetters is best for our bettors. They tack back and north, correcting the dots, the daughter. The road her home, the corps her dumb lover: shoveling a brave face on the failure to save her with highway dividers. So go with the flow to flower or stall in high style, pooled to appeal. Be a pal, be an appalling pallbearer, be there in that blunder. So behave: be a “have”—halve the

43

fictional big picture’s son et lumiere. Sum for everyone? So know better next crime or be as you were, unsolved and hardly sober, soldier. It’s murder getting over now or never. Wet ever. It’s so long and so latte dough as acoustics accost costumed auditors lost in storm-tossed star-crossed kissedoff echoes: S.O.S. So. So. So solo soul, oh so soluble soma. Dark harbors. Sea? C.O.D. A-lights in the last call a tight swallow—god and gone—a fraud of your own shadow. Cold coda. Cod

44

The White Box of Mirror Dissolved Is Not Singular White for diluting dreams Cy Twombly

Sun or eye or boat or stiff reeds on a small island rising out of their own reflection A surface alluded to these ambiguous traces seeming to undulate like a spill of cloud against cloud or a pale drift net deep in a white ocean These airs made of what remains of a repeated gesture To begin with nothing I won’t tell anyone what you say here the water promises and the reeds take it up as a whisper which reaches at last the very ears gossip discovers A reiterated not makes at once as surface as if removed and as modulated its horizon too high a landscape the auditor is led always deeper into and shut out of lead on lead You’ll tell I know you will A “counter-love . . . the reflection of the love he inspires Asleep among the stirred swirl of sweet white blossoms asleep or passed out Felt The impasto parents Reading the repeated mark no ear for that Sun or outstretched hand or boat or empty crown spiky as a battered flower

45

These airs made of traces of the first repeated gesture “and a cloud came by and it broke apart on the tower. A small piece of it came in my window and floated across the room No ear for that music Even now I can barely talk about the erasure what should have been pleasure the sense of something lived through the horizon line over my head shame a stiff weight parts Under a thick white sky the impasto parents the edge loss I sought on surfaces too fragile to breathe on almost the signs of trauma they endured

46

Passages

Would be a cloud in all its vagueness “They cashed the check For more than I wrote” It is the steam age The image of the oncoming Engine so realistic Would be a glass roof And marry the metal framework The audience leaps from their seats Drunk with hope It is the age of industry Would be a puff of smoke or pass Over some silvery spill caught Or so she claimed drunk An ongoing failure to reflect “We are suffering while we wait For the bank to straighten it out” In the doorways the audience The streets fill with water So deep you begin to see boats “It was a dark and stormy night” It was it was Believed she’d marry A grid a gleaming support Completely without stars Pictured herself floating off A swan or surrealist nude Image pocked by the endless Dreary precipitation “I know I didn’t make it out for that much” 47

Puffs of grey they are signaling Spirals of black each tower A vase stacked with dirty cotton Or a tangle of black lines What Is it now the audience bent over Coughs and hacks translates These meaningless squiggles to A word in this case rain in fact Would be capricious irresponsible Her light her tinkling laugh Like glass falling out in small Pieces from the broken Roof of an abandoned passage Would be a fog bank The audience Stumbles toddlers again These first uncertain steps Arms stretched empty out Never got over her fear It is a golden age “I don’t see How they can do that” even now The train entering the station An arbitrary squiggle Seems miraculous Would be a trace and a force It is the age of reason reason Impossible to convince her of that The audience identifies briefly With those who stooping remove The dead leaves and shards Of glass Safe and courageous 48

Known for her vision far & wide etc Would have hovered in the air Above some means of conveyance And been erased Imagined it As seen on the silver screen Someone holding one hand palm Up in the fading light tugs At a twinkling gem-like Splinter and then blood credits

49

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Turn

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If

If a speaker is a window reflecting an occupation Can we say this “situation” is an accident Shards lifted broken voices witness trashed If the window was an assertion of injustice nonetheless If a listener is uncertain (face the glass) If the interior is a preoccupation If there are events but first and last are meaningless Contradictions once polished to smoothness and gloss If the window is a history of (money or) distance and revision Webbed by an intricate clockwork of specific If one body lies only the next and the next and the If a view is a viewer (deaf) Can we say this is based on a complete misunderstanding If a frame holds the same clouds in endless

53

TURN essay

“Not a goal . . . a melody . . .” FN “Another time . . . a lighted torch . . . tell me . . . and I will tell you . . .” HB

54

OWN sweet most strongly overcome my own

STRING abandoned dislocation impending disconnect like the word money an individual and what does it mean to perfect what’s left of “And what exactly does it mean to wonder about this over coffee, solitude, perfect  / Weather?” “They gather” the author smoothly continues, “he shifted from side to side to prevent the road from dismantling / His skin as he was dragged on / down the highway.” There is no “as if ” in the unattributed deduced-as-willed shift, no acknowledgement that (if it is James Byrd Jr. 1949-1998) he could not prevent himself from being flayed and then dismembered (his bones ground down, as the pathologist would note, his genitals ripped from his body) by any movement of his own, though the autopsy revealed his efforts to hold his head up: the head that—torn off with the arm and the neck— was discovered in a ditch a mile away from what was left of the body . . . And apparently abandons that subject. Roughly to find oneself in what began somewhere farther back and continues into In a sense the text you are about to encounter is the result of dragging another book “120 miles . . . chained . . . to the bumper of a Corvette

55

doing 90 mph”: a simile one of James Byrd’s murderers used to describe his feelings, in a letter to his estranged wife, five years before the murder. A trope he tested on someone else, or, as we say ‘took out’ on another. This project is a meditation on feelings becoming language and language becoming action and it is, in the small town of its procedural structure, deliberately an impoverishment. Of the men involved in the death (Jasper, Texas; June 7, 1998) none had more than a high school education, all had prior arrests, three had done time, and only one was currently employed. Well-educated, articulate, and casual about the facts, the author of my source text seemed to me to speak too easily and briefly ‘the unspeakable,’ turning public action back into private analogy as an introductory motif for a poetic self-analysis. The chosen verb* exposed a distance enacted throughout the book I wore to ragged evidence, slowly, distrusting my own facility with words and silences. In the career of my pencil through the source I found myself exposing an obsession with the relationship between language and reality: in this the author and I are close, although (perhaps) more kin than kind. This meditation on what might be appropriate is also a questioning of what it is to appropriate—a questioning (also vital to my source) of the relationship between the individual and the community. The torture and murder of James Byrd was in part an effort to pass a sort of *Dismantle: to divest of a mantle or cloak; to divest or strip (of any clothing, protection or the like); to strip off that which covers; to strip (anything) of the necessary equipment, furniture, or apparatus, to unfurnish; esp. to strip a fortress of its defenses [a mighty fortress is my self] to unrig “Calculated to dismantle the mind and scatter its materials of knowledge” (W Roberts Looker-on 1794); To render (fortifications or the like) useless for their purpose; to pull down, to take to pieces, destroy, raze. Dismantling, dismantler, one who dismantles or strips “For the dismantling of his letters he wishes they may be covered with the cloak of confusion.” Milton Eikon 1847 (Wks)

56

initiation rite within the removed but still vivid context—prison—two of the three perpetrators came out of and would return to. Communication and community overlap and shift, unstable: not a matter of will, not confined by place. In recontextualizing word within world I hoped to, as an ancient Keres song puts it, “add my breath to your breath.” Yet as the author writes, apparently quoting “the mutual friend” who appears in some trouble in the text, “. . . It kills me when you breathe with me.” This precious and endangered individuality seeking and resisting a seductive but dangerous connection is a subject I know something about. In 1998 the Governor of Texas, on his way to becoming a president of these United States, refused to visit the town of Jasper, claiming that the best thing he could do was “to tell the revulsion I felt in my gut when I saw what happened.” This isolated interior replay (responsive but not responsible), trapped yet told, turned out to be one of the enacted concerns my source text exposed as I wrote my reading. Also visible: the necessity of understanding our desire to distance ourselves, and the ways we find to do so. “Incidents,” our teacher had learned to say, somewhere: “there had been incidents”—who set us out to seek the concrete image for the idea. These words are not my own, more so than ever, I found them in a structure made of mirrors I dismantled, rewrote to raw fragment submitted to a procedure—remains I remain with branches the southern aftermath for what was that offered the end of like “a goddamn big car and” expressed

57

A POOL before you wild every over streams no

POOLS inside the either way broken somewhere still we are not late

frozen parable again the word

forgiveness split

58

caught inside loss again

IN YOU once was a dwelling fastened called

INSIDE A clock the lover numbers the longer tick innermost sensation something slipping until once your device had become your abandonment said the clock said the we must when the no when the wild watched you from the frozen black ticking this is your this

59

WREST everything to pass exactly wild lost in endless how else become

WORD CLOUD attached to cage your subjects at which point turned familiar with a mirror writing implements vocabulary from previous desire the sun against history a clock on the mantle designed to forward

60

cloud forest like like dust

fate was to harm

wreckage of cages picture imprisoned page

their parrot eye of the bird’s

and the rest

NO waves like waves suspended

ON COINAGE “think” into being nothing think hopelessly the room night defined by like a sound or disparity

overwhelmed by I came to be

highly reflective elsewhere enough to think into something wasn’t right here through there all along historically indebted every wake leaves half-broken an outdated currency signs as if losing were losing where was I asking why why

61

EX sometimes often in place of dissemble no fire no no bridge

SELF glass wall of glass codes the South reflects time in the landscape of disfigurement reflects authentically imported from another window appears where the glass in its frame was seen through a desperate unconscious by the side of the road this circumstance a name for suspended glass meant to be “experience—” in tune with

62

in tune with

EXPANSION buried invisible secret

imminent

EXPANSION clockwork the outside wall thin circumference hot if a speaker is a statement reflecting its occupation if a speaker is a window if a window is uncertain (face the glass) next bound by occupants glass speaker facing the wall a history of distance one body bound where the next accident how long this desire to move past

say “summer” and disappear mirror would be a summer night made would be face pressed to the

precarious between would at the window last

63

WILDERNESS as wilderness attached as ornament trained across abridge asymmetrical state

HERE inside suspended connected to

witness

picture yourself a stalled version of yourself twisting to be simultaneously the sole countless moving parts played by wind listen this voice borrowed a river the Reconstruction ribboned continuum too strange to answer echo of this golden cord

twining inward after before

MATTER where beautiful because apart where the very thought of the dream said wake me then left

64

the dream of

return

moving the dream when departure refigured the landscape of dream dream feedback birth of

sound

65

EAST in and around being

fashioned to

breaking

LAST you yourself / you tell yourself / coat yourself perfect twirling clothed in the environment reacting to creating moment As if in a split screen / other side of the actual a man “twirling” at the end of a logging chain, so the path of what the report keeps calling “a dried brown substance” weaves from side to side while the tire tracks of the truck go straight: Tram Road, Huff Creek Road, to undo what was left of the torso in front of a black / a woman from a famous Impressionist painting “clothed in tulle confections,” layers of white as if made of clouds—goddess of the industrial revolution because she materializes from it like a cloud—drifting through the field away from us out of the foreground spattered with red poppies I pulled as hard as I could back down the weight of the incommunicable surrounded a wave lifts and lifts to be like and shone like and rose like disappear brighter scatter your body green on this nothing seems longing enough seems love love to drown 66

I was born I was I was this way carries back like light previously dark case of please senseless and surface progress anticipates a picture on a wall I was I was this way a replica true make rise from a mistake sings money make the drawing hour appear cloud clouds number in front of a tree / the edge of a concrete culvert the history of the next late model pickup enlightenment the time it takes to understand those “I appear to the public therefore I exist” / “Someday,” he said, “I’m going to be famous.” a spectacle entire into currently to break open the beautiful scrawl there is nothing else beautiful there is nothing else beautiful the sky

simultaneously stars a primer grey marks

wired

nothing nothing is beautiful when the

sky cross it

is 67

nothing afterwards directly the gloss light enough

nothing

rising out of the water I finally saw myself a distance the ultimate ownership to make duplicated image

sense a perfect way to be in a garden bare eyes its existence

68

through

TRUTH

HOUSE

the way things invite metaphor across nothing can contain one box an icy path loops matter the world becomes caught in another

MATERIALS set to another description of winter remembrance glittery torture cinematic question blank question again and then the words never forgotten static outside a projection highrise heartbeat clouds stories transparent corridor will translated into space the knowable gold see through illuminated skin where nothing is hidden that gleaming stare cloud cover drops revelation truth glass the word shivering

structures

see through

69

PUBLICITY spoke through the thought floated slogan above signposts fastened to the ceiling standing in for sky barely standing in what we really mean is standing exiled to last century’s signs the requisite end of an evening enabled by terror to protect a box would soon stand in for everything not yet called the box inside the box replay another’s suffering mirror a second between structures uncertain

dream

70

these the real body thinking glassy not yet begun but expired glued to the invented we saved

our current

space thin white

TRUTH trained through each head hung through a square over a shallow mirror

END and crashing down shining a principle who knew it loved the glossed labyrinth of the same the last time I saw you you had that boundary properly called intellectual dullest black presence skyframe chain to explain because will haunt exactly lonely dream of that’s more like it immediate meaning this “bad energy” and loyalty to those who are lost shadowing the stage the curtain rose meaning the audience

71

POLIS your other wove to bone ground down and when you step into that clearing you explode

IS bursts of energy emanating from the you are lit from like “I am lit from” seconds to glitter through only a switch soon fog resolves into a more recognizable terror turning inalienable beautiful simultaneously they say your true core resembles a collection of spent imagery beneath a wrecked private architecture despair as if it were a cage careful of the bars time imagined beneath the surface of its false yet certain morning when your outside shines and you are lit up from

SPACE

I said you’re not going to drag that man like you did that mailbox And he said I know where we’re taking him

72

SAME two o’clock blue u.s. more invasive than the unspectacular exactly where you’re supposed to be

SAME nothing and everything hurtling toward your tricked out English turns

obsessed at the center

history to burn

forever unbroken landscape uncertain of its relation to the evidence workspace behind clockface here is the character here an abstraction

“the mechanical form”

suspended like a thought above

thinking racing through the moment

hurtling toward a drive toward

73

NAME trained around the standard a hybrid

appearance

CRIME jewel encrusted years fashioned into a parody of the future as you remember it include a body covered in clouds hanging over expertly shivering transparent layer upon layer of exteriors the real surfaces invite mutations a mirage of floating trees [the jewel of the forest] leads always “over it” the future has become more real than the future beneath you

see you

have time to put skin on a dying field limb to limb in chaotic

74

tenderness

EXAMPLE the specimens on which you base your descriptions expired

AMERICA sees the future blinded structure a songbird another under the singalong unfolded a dark road ash the hour

75

INTERPRETING pages you scan fall faster than I can read the tree grasping light

TURNING THINGS inside the infinite mimicking controlled reading fear replaced facsimile allegiance to feeling

beauty visible long distance system perfectly ordered refusal to accept the past nothing

slip away atop a stainless steel table watching sound waves scheduled to appear where a heart should have “I do not want to sound rhetorical,” Byrd’s daughter wrote in 1998, for a statement on proposed Texas Hate Crimes Legislation (passed in 2001 under Governor Perry), “but I feel as if I have to tell the story in this way. For a moment, I want you to imagine, if you can, walking home from an anniversary party, when three individuals pick you up, take you to a remote area, beat you repeatedly, then while you are still alive chain you by your ankles to the back of a truck and then proceed to drag you for about two and a half to three miles down a logging road. The point in which you actually die after enduring a tremendous amount of pain and broken bones is when your head and arm are ripped from your body like a piece of paper is torn. Now stop imagining.” How far can we go down this road, imagining? What happens to and in that journey becoming no longer a movement of our own will but a form of transportation? Can you imagine walking home? Yes. Can you imagine

76

being offered a lift and being taken somewhere else and hurt? Yes (what would it be like to be unable to imagine that possibility?). And then we stop at that clearing where we come to understand how inextricably imagination is joined to knowing. Can you imagine . . . but here, “chained to the back of a truck,” empathy begins to shred as “you” become blazon: parts of a body, and “after” is after “[t]he point in which you actually die.” Francis Renee Mullin’s long sentences, and her sudden vagueness about the distance, trace the uncertain site of ghostlier demarcations, tugging her auditors over the line into an area where every claim to imagine or understand fails. For two miles a living man was tortured, his dismembered and mutilated body was dragged one mile more. Imagination stops—turns—before we are told to stop imagining: where finding words for horror becomes the horror of finding that horror is words, in which a “body” in its tearing can be compared to “a piece of paper.” That clean distanced figure haunts me like “And when the line has, is, a deadness,” Charles Olson asks, “is it not a heart which has gone lazy, is it not, suddenly, slow things, similes, say, adjectives, or such, that we are bored by?” “Brothers,” he’ll say, more than once in the essay (“Projective Verse,” 1950), pulling us onward, urging us to see things his way, which is also Robert Creeley’s way. Brothers. Within another gated community (gender), that singular and indefinite heart, which needs to work harder, and the desire (identified as shared) to go faster, targeting what bores us, whatever gets in the way of “attention, that crucial thing.” “For there is a whole flock of rhetorical devices which have now to be brought under a new bead, now that we sight with the line. Simile is only one bird who comes down, too easily.” “Simile is only one bird” is—of course—a metaphor, set within another conceit: the writer as 77

hunter, as killer. Olson’s tropes leave open the complicated question of what it is we are doing when we attend, while enacting an essential difficulty: seeing likeness (seeing in terms of likeness) is as constant as the distrust of such (double) vision must be. In a famous poem by Robert Duncan an extended metaphor makes the poet a falcon: the bringing down of “little birds” the only way to be loved, that is, to matter, that is, for the speaker’s life to have its shared out, constantly given and revoked, acknowledged, imagined, denied, and renewed meaning. Community—who doesn’t know it?—is uneasy, shifting, and costly: belonging and not belonging both have a price. But those who pay attention to each other are better off than those unrecognized—who pay with their lives. Turn was a project taken on originally over the first anniversary of the death of my stepmother, Ingrid Nickelsen (1943-2005). A landscape painter, she went alone into the Del Norte Wilderness on August 1st and—badly hurt in a fall—died (of exposure, of hunger and thirst) on or around the 15th. She had no cell phone, and only a few of her friends knew where she was going or that she planned to spend just three days. No one missed her, that is, worried: no one alerted the authorities. Her body was discovered on August 18th; further down the trail the blank canvas set under a tree.

78

UTTER arrange shade and disappear

UTTERLY to look

like

water on the wrong side constructing underwater the outside to let empty destroy the inside no perfect

79

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Troposphere

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Pass

What I wrote down before is useless all of it except as a record of those states She goes on in the sentence surviving

explaining

everything

In my dream I can’t stay in the house what makes empathy seem dangerous Not the air

we keep moving

Disparate fortunes

across

Vision

light

sun

We don’t net the air

a museum of traces

delighted Why

explanation

torn

drag

marks

earlier

an interior

blue strips to miss

language not lovely

83

Cloud Seeding: From a Journal

Head full of markers Production of mists the history of Who here has been truly educated Signs on stakes wires actual Imagined construction of Outlines boundaries borders Mechanically echoing Production of proof of Pictured where exactly A dog when you rang the bell The more direct route obviously “I can read” barking Prerecorded notes vs posted official Warnings rain chant apologetic The writing looked desperate Barking mechanically As if there wasn’t any reason The shorter route clearly Visibly evaporating Demarcations property lines A silence or “pause” between Rights of the citizen comic Misspellings and human Prohibitions vs dark admonitions Repeated “Bad dog barking!” Conjured trusty guardian Damp itinerary of chewed shoes Formed and vanished Neither snow nor sleet nor dark 84

A voice in a cloud of suspicion Gr-r-r-r as of night Forms of literacy who here Has barked their shins On something Sound triggers an image Seeing no obstacles truly To open a digression breathing Flashed on that inward eye a fanged hot Source knuckles on the collar whitening A barked command blinds Who here was meant to identify with I wandered not exactly complaining Each lonely parasite an entry

85

The Visual World behind My Head

Moves with my head I hold a tear of quicksilver up one anamorphic eye lolls in my open hand hoping to catch what I can’t The world as it is really without me She didn’t believe I loved her or it was just I didn’t love her enough you tell me Sky mountains trees trail What looks like a burned spot on the scree where they found the body two young boys fleeing what they believed was a murder scene In this organizing apparatus she judges me wanting I stand silent on the edge of every conversation about grief to the space that seems empty I say How little you understand anything [coldly] Moves to avoid me avoids me whether or not it moves why moving as if articulation would save me tilted out as a silver tear my seeing seeing the episodic character never experienced as a continuity Everything

86

comes so easily to you her bitter accusation voice I’m alone with memory it seemed she understood almost nothing of a life she said she wanted [as an artist] left me exasperated pitying lonely why trust the swirl if the ‘completed’ visual field in the forest or wilderness area of ‘redundancies’ in the urgent ‘effort after meaning’ movements of reading the world rapid trembling I have also lost my recently I have also lost my mother recently yes my stepmother she’s “In experiments where volunteers deliberately attempted to fix their eyes steadily on a point delicate measuring devices showed hundreds of slight movements away from the point around it back toward it” repeated arrival world blur of spill of

through

mourning

87

Virga (“I have been prevented from writing . . .”)

Me with my outsized hand in the air, wringing out a cloud-like brain or a brain-like cloud that is everything we’ll say we’ll be able to say. Me and that brain in the sky. Floating. Her handwriting never really changed. The reality is that there are only so many hours in a day we say. I don’t know who “we” were under the masks we wore only that there should be a stain where I set that sponge down—it’s a shared reality. “Aug 1,” she wrote, words jagged lines tracing the stones under the outspread trail map, “I broke it.” So many hours in a day so many days in a week in these containers we invented. Up above everything in the wilderness area. My fist as we say we’ll be able to say in the air and under that what? Virga: a blur as of failed erasure trailing away. A conversation, when I knew who the “we” was: now a plastic sack of grayish grit given her name. Only so many weeks in a year, years in a life, chances to change, to say, to say, to say. My tiny hand in the flowing water, someone I loved slipping through my fingers, lines of vague smoke (the reality is) becoming transparent trailing away

88

Orographic

Flat sky light as elsewhere light as reference to light to look up later coming in with a vague idea of the meaning what you meant by what was meant Nothing to trust but the repetition Long silences (“I have,” he said, flatly “No interiority.”) Only the charm and thread Alphabet Rustling of pages rustling of cattle rust High thin featureless clouds in fact Contingencies Conversations about what to pack What is good enough intelligence As glowing discovering edges layers in what seemed featureless light as what you meant to say the switched because you forgot or found as you were speaking another better word for it Exactly light that “I’m working too hard right now,” he said, “no time for . . .” Why not change it Intended The book is thick, the woods are thick, the plot Or back Inflict thicket

89

“Only a fear of death which keeps me up at night.” First faint haze of green Stuck interpellant In what sense In every sense

90

(Stratus) Endlessness

Of clouds. Of the possibility of saying something about, of finding something to. A shing. Of the need or desire. Of a [word here] for a description to match the thing described, overlay or exchange in motion, sportscaster style: now, now, now. Endless necessity of finding words new words for exactly that shade and shape of nervous anger, that deflection of interest which, increasing, allows one to walk out I speak of his face now, nothing there, “not a cloud in the sky,” unless you count that vague high haze of brightness both of us trying to be in fact properly interested always the possibility of clouds anyway. Endless attempt to find some words for what, the nothing there always there, no disaster, just a failure to be there for each other, to be there. Self-doubt mirrored, the endless advice which was all it seemed sometimes we had to offer and always the damped down but barely chilled frustration with that advice so it was as if we were always in some low grade secret almost struggle saying change, change, change, and why can’t you and you don’t and you always never muted accusations anyway heard and thank you for the advice I know you’d like me to be happy because then I’d be nicer. Endlessness of distrust having decided not to be fully honest, each word, each tiny movement, taking us further off course into someplace strange and stiff and silent it’s going to be a lot harder to get back from if you can ever get back what does it matter you start to feel you’ve forgotten how to talk, to think, to hope, what holds this together anyway, nothing, only the endlessness of further transformation in fact breaking up vanishing slowly ragged edges fraying out

91

Cloud Money

1. Source Report Contributions of $200 or more from individuals: Contributions from Political Action Committees: Contributions from Indian Tribes: Candidate (self-funded): Dissolve, dissolving Room in a dream (had said, was to have said, was to have been recorded, saying) (in a mirror) emotion recollected in the printing factory Corporate accountability Shouting at a shut door before the image exploding of . . . catches and smoke fills the screen or is (our shadows) the screen Although this is a normal and expected use of money (cloud outlook “If for some reason you lose money in a St Cloud Times news rack” “It’s like it all happened once” (No money No down financing) Request for information a memorized list of positions former positions room in a dream (“you said,” the foreigner started, “you,” nervous) do you know (how well do you know); do you know (are you now or have you ever) how well have you memorized how do you know what you know There are certain facts about that country

92

The money supply We will fix this speech (For the convention) We will for the opening moments in which a woman / by putting the subject / to sleep Fix this stuttering so the repeated dissolve of half finished phonemes in which 8:46 a.m. (ad hoc) 9:03 a.m. (ad finem) in the candlelit bedroom Enchanting beauty shimmering Like an iridescent cloud being But it’s gonna take money A whole . . . (Intervening To be their representative The image is of slowly waving leaves

93

2. Cloud Seeding Th th th

There

In the (bank of the) red earth in the earth / have you signed / a pay ph pho phone s-s-s-slot in the crumbling iron-rich d-d-damp clay texture as of a heavy c-cake opening in which to push a coin / name in another language / for mother (“no, what I actually said was”) the buried subtext When you wake like printing money

(No credit Check

no application

Fee) Feel Feelings (not a phone you could speak into but a you could only listen I want to tell you my dream this work “could lead to the breakdown of the protective space that exists in the world for the kind of poetry I . . . (As my teacher once wrote . . . ‘This text is not conducive enough to a social and literary world in which my particular personality and imagination seem likely to thrive.’)” Lit from within (as clouds could appear to be) / Listen I want to tell you my dream / I want to tell you what happened to me / This was where I was when you could only listen There was someone waiting for me And if they had been there

94

“ . . . As soon as I get a job (thus money), I’ll be buying it, as well as . . . ‘My Friends’ and ‘Alight’ from the live stuff, and, of course, my favorite, ‘Cloud 9 has caused companies, which have plenty of money, to postpone spending Urgent dream

first person

These paths are eroding These paths made by those who have who need made by their passing These paths (the child put a damp handful of earth in her mouth) dissolve In heavy rain

first person / almost visibly

95

3. Picture Guide to Transitions And so they erased from the maps because it displeased her that country because it displeased their queen moving the borders so there was no unsightly reminder (blank space) because it displeased who was in mourning blank country and no one was to teach anyone of its existence again indeed they were not even to mention its name Population and products Commerce and communication Washed out uncertain (let me tell you a story) Pressing a coin into the earth . . . as particles in a scientists’s cloud chamber have no lawyers The curve of the path as it followed the curve of the mountain Appeared to break off or continue into the sky Anyway

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4. Corporate Accountability Remains yes remains as a memorial even though it was long ago (exploding Though there are still the same exactly the same number of hours in a day Someone I had lost touch with Kept saying no I can’t give you that information she (washed into An appointment for the one on Cloud Street and handed over possibly the largest amount of (perilous ravines and the lines (Enter City Hall and go upstairs. Talk to the Mayor. He will need a code for his safe Candlelit economy in the bedroom mind set addenda Iridescent recurring worry addenda my darling ad infinitum South Central Nebraska was not the name of that country (besides (“But I thought you said,” she started again, nervously) Candlelight closing date GiftCloud not currently ad-da-da-denda Her jet beads clicking as she stepped away from the table on which they’d placed The adjusted world map she let us know—as only she knew how—she was pleased Could not stop her from eating the earth for we had nothing Candelit 10:03 a.m. ad valorem credit shimmering connection I am a cloud / As a cloud / no man / a piece of the main “I do not know where the wind will blow me next” Stream, streaming

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Message

The age demanded a garage band, Rampage, or The Industrial Average, some plugged-in sounding out of that sudden blankness at the end of attending a message which seemed to begin and end with its postage; the rest an eerie muted rush of sheer (hear) (here) verbiage. Or alternatively action (breakage, spillage), if the too tricky lyrics, like a higher dosage, fail to assuage. Ass wage. If expected sense takes hearing hostage, sabotage betrays a cleavage, where to make one’s way through is also to adhere to. Spoils shared among the entourage (personage, ash-bleached visage; personage, hooded suspect led back to a cage): spoilage. The return on a long-ago tutelage or just because “because,” like an afterimage, the reappearing shadow of our equipage: Wait, someone left a package . . . Barrage of debris and then, off-stage, a brief blockage in the—channeled for repeated leakage—reportage. And back to the frottage: What did it feel like? Two, at least, stages: personage weeping and the disparaged “savage” whose emotions (if envisaged at all) seem merely a seepage, a sort of mortgage constantly readjusted by memory’s triage, replacing the blackened bandage around a body electrified by its condition or function (bondage . . . ). We were informed—halfway down the passage—that we should go back, return to our offices. “We,” ghost assemblage, trapped in the symbolic, which collapses, sifting memoranda out over the city: page after page after page dropping outdated “to do” lists soundless down on the safe in their gated Ice Age. Alternatively fees payable for (anchorage . . . ). Numbly mumbling, “carnage,” and “chunks of fuselage,” a would-be sage seeks some kind of parage, decides the question’s money (in his dotage). Leverage as leverage! What percentage? So salvage an advantage and then garbage it takes time to haul away, isolating each ravaged fragment in the effort to identify usage. Is that your luggage? How manage this hemorrhage of montage, visual sewage, flowing past in pieces but always seen from a single vantage under anger’s voltage? Voyage; alienage. Word in another language meaning varnish or glaze and also 98

private viewing (opening), a slippage suggesting action and condition make a marriage. How to engage? Here’s a suffrage, courage—as versus isolated rage. Put the decoupage of iconic images presaging those sudden slowed still unbelievable collapses—fireball corsages, clouds of black yardage—in storage: refuse the corkage for the ullage in that ever more undrinkable vintage, rebooted or rebottled, as per the adage. No more village espionage to rummage a meaning under the coverage: scarcely camouflaged in coinage find the lineage of our enlightenment romanced into deregulated wattage. Cry amperage and arbitrage: the bricolage of the brokerage. Who’s totaling the outage? “The damage is to the other building,” someone announced, “you can go back now.” Showing his age, our Orpheus returns to an orphanage. On the homepage this elegy for wordage: song singing its agents, right down to the last syllable of recorded wreckage.

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Daisies Tis sweet to know that stocks will stand When we with Daisies lie— That Commerce will continue— And Trades as briskly fly— Emily Dickinson

Stimulus

to stem then

Words pluck It’s working it isn’t working it’s working it isn’t working it’s Central

count on it torn

Means more answers other Attempts on this indeterminate Inflorescence meant a headless Bush a white mess of ripped off Petals “like or as” punched (2000) Chads in the trash these precincts pick Working it may seek to reaffirm a pre-existing belief or court decision 100

act out of whimsy isn’t working it’s Growing in waste places ask not What but ask what Can you

gather

Working it isn’t “it is easy to lie there” my Moon or dog Days your Golden effeuiller la marguerite Our ashen airWaves flower Congressman I will think Carefully about your proposal And get back to you Working it’s working with it isn’t Like “to lie”

“easiest” rhizomefor the love of

Torture Give me your answer too

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On a Clear Day

Summer Color leached out by light. Everything the same brightness, marked distance. Actual instance: glossy raven, head cocked, standing over what in the gleam of the road is a shadow almost shadowless. Flat light and the belief that by certain alterations (okay the “empty” road), not small (okay), one could . . . at last. Dropping the unctuous, hungry intelligence elsewhere, into the long green grass of a deserted schoolyard, perhaps. It takes a day, almost, some section of hours, to think of what you should have said (in response). First (always) there’s something you have to admit: an emotion or immediate reaction to render transparent. Admit. The sky so pale it’s almost white, as in “I miss.” Almost at once a sadness. The image is nothing. To try to hold a clarity against

Sand What you inherited The tradition

a far cry desert

dissolve

Loosely sketched by hand some fine stuff swept A graininess, a blur in the depiction “marked distance” Becoming the subject accidental Transient narratives The dyed grains of

intersect assembled to

reconcile figure then swept

Unfinished Transfer The noises you make you are meant to think of as betrayal: they empty a world you no longer inhabit. Still you are pressed for further sounds: they establish the other world, they reaffirm its difference. Later you will speak of this as follows: I heard somebody making noises I hoped would stop, I was so glad

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when at last there was silence. Something seems to go right through: all the way through. A sheen across the wings ends ragged and the rough cry cried off

Proposal What matters is light Here where they cross look To mirror summon resemblance Mingled instances attempted unlock Begun at the center and composed east to south To sleep in the center A disturbance erasure of the prepared site

Maps Something in the sludge at the bottom of the cup tilted drift of grounds pattern in flight a flock of birds adjusted swoop of what do you see there scatter “no explosion like” faint shadows the creases in the opened palm held out Here where they meet a murmur here where this one look breaks off image in a fingernail shape in the steaming pile of heaped entrails how to proceed pours a clean stream of sand to start glittering eye open beak black molten lead falling of its own weight into the water a quick outraged hiss set it down elsewhere always hurry the clock strikes swallowing one by one the twelve sweet cold grapes collision course swirls the finished cup eyeing the slide of residue reluctance

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Love (Stratus) “And to their scattered bodies go . . .”

Having ‘got past’ the bright chatter to clumsy jokes then at last a glum silence hoping maybe ‘the real’ would slowly emerge (a pleasure in birds, something else) and then we could talk. Really talk. The talk dreamed of somewhere deep in the dangerous phrase We have to talk. We talk to have. Structured on the old idea of inner and outer: real and apparent. We would get to the truth: a veil—you know—parts

Love (Stratus Opacus)

What erases the signs of the morning Is the sign of erasure itself indistinct Siren wah wah wah away Where the visual logic reveals only The viewer’s absence a lie many lies A “‘thicket’ ” where wandering lost Bright flat featureless very pale grey As if a day not begun had yet as if I were writing this having had to turn A light on in the middle of the night Sky full of light no apparent source Letter beginning Never have I felt

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So natural a part of someone else’s life Passion flattened by distrust The weary anxious sense of caring Carrying I wrote sustained by I know You are brilliant and sweet Wrote that and wept It doesn’t make sense I can’t make sense of it sense Itself sign a death at the center If I could have faked my way back If I could go back and illuminate Nothing has healed Long over the false “beautiful false” Mostly gone now and nothing apparently ‘Under’ that “I have no inner life” A pleasure in birds To begin what brightened the sky A storm of light to see Ragged edges movement A failure of imagination meaning Further work And flat again as if the slightly Glowing thin patches moving past You only hallucinate an opening tender A way to make for a moment I lost my heart other phrases like that Waiting for someone else to emerge Imagined as shedding everything floating up 105

Love (Opacus)

Meanwhile anything to kill time obdurate yet fleeing substance between the seeker and what if we were as close as we’d ever be the day we met or during the brief time we believed we were getting to know one another and spent years slowly wrecking that what sustained us you hoped I’d be reasonable I hoped you’d be intimate in some way I’d be able to trust

words to talk myself past widening doubt

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Love (Scud)

of grey over white where the blue was gone now a phone call and each time you think it’s over (“how can you be so . . .”) it starts again elsewhere all that work still to do someday never words black frantic falling out of sight beyond a window frame “birds make their bodies bomb-like” how will you recognize the moment dragged out made of blurry near misses overlaid acceptance after-image of dark spots a triangle on the white page having looked up into the triangular arrangement of lights wait blue as they vanish a phone call leaving proof of the vibration in the glance searing out from the center the return of the surface blank you are not there now nor anywhere else “hints” of sky blue sky but in such scattered fragments nothing comes of it now ever ragged edges by which to name the person writing this “got up and moved the large white bookcase behind the dark green door & I write down the colors because they will also vanish And this room along with the rest” and “I” blurrings and thin seemingly worn places of brightness relying inconstant black dipping lines of telephone wires rippled as seen through old glass what connects us these distortions not apparent at a glance explain how who we were to each other what we meant to us ragged detached

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Edge of There

Number letters caught intimate Phantom past direction edge of Flashing sharp choice

abandoned

I am after all here birdbird arched Bridge of smoke floating along above “I’m just grasping” reflected will of / walled back / mute recognized as changed irrevocable ruined uncanny angle after all (no change) (don’t change) you (don’t fragment choirs of bird-wronged (winged) thought (whatever you thought) coughed

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Love (Altocumulus Translucidus & Altostratus Opacus) “What I’ d say about that” (“What I wanted to say about . . .”)

Last night’s storm this wind-scuffed One bird insists on insistence The same sad accusation stalled shifts in my head harsh words still a refusal to face what forced as truth One version fine brittle accurate The way a detail is accurate in place at scale then blown up detached not Strung on telephone wires water drops as if the wires are beaded beads in fact Dangle from these wires so the analogy suggests itself and seems false Caught looped fading metallic a gloss on the dulling plastic catch words for this Light the trees have lightly tentatively leafed I hadn’t noticed Dense clouds apparently uniform though a muted glow seeps through in spots not broken Closing or threatening to break open and so they betray their separateness discrete Brightnesses caught and diffused in a vapor in transit in and out of suggested shape Sayings about each prevailing condition in translation seem to promise rain or “showers” later promise a later and The horizon is spoken to or against but not of no color is mentioned These appearances are not uniform And pass

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Desire (not a cloud in the sky)

Not a bird but the cat gazing out one bright window at the empty line where There have been birds eyeing that space alert to the sound of them elsewhere noises like Wet stones falling hard against each other or a scissors snip snip snip A harsh call a slight whistle one rough surface grazing another repeated At regular intervals then nothing not nothing traffic the overcast an emptiness lights Us sky like a blank “if I need to say it” What must be said or heard at times so completely mysterious If birds would appear (doves) Preening on a stretch of wire between insulators courting Her eyes would widen ears flatten jaw spasm open and shut on stuttered clicks A broken excitement voiceless as if she cracked small bones already in her teeth Urgent echo of what has not happened discovered lost (loves) Then rising all at once a storm of flashing shadows pass so Swiftly the room itself seems to lift and turn in the shattered light

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(Pieces from the Broken Roof of an Abandoned Passage)

Splinter and blood credits A twinkling gem-like Up in the fading light tugs Someone holding out one palm As seen on the silver screen And erased Imagined Above some means of conveyance Would have hovered in the air Known for her vision Of glass Courageous The dead leaves and shards With those who stooping remove The audience identifies briefly Impossible to convince her of that It is the age of reason reason Would be a trace and a force An arbitrary squiggle miraculous The train entering the station How they can do that” even now It is a golden age “I don’t see Never got over her fear Arms stretched empty out A word in this case rain in fact These meaningless squiggles to Coughing and translates Is it now the audience bent over Or a tangle of black lines What A vase of Imagined 111

Spirals away each tower Puffs of grey they are signaling I didn’t make it out for that much” Dreary precipitation “I know Image pocked by the endless Completely without stars A grid a gleaming support It was it was Believed she’d marry “It was a dark and stormy night” So deep you begin to see boats The streets fill with water In the doorways the audience An ongoing failure to reflect Or so she claimed drunk Over some silvery spill caught And marry the metal framework

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After-Image (Louisiana Company)

To see the light track as a rippled luminous plane The exact relationship The urge to hold onto the falling paper The desire to make someone “pay” Presentation of suffering in stead Payable at sight and in the coin of their issue Curved brightness graph and contrast edge So that if you hold a piece of paper to the screen “A vision so splendid” promised Returns Converted into gold and driven over the border in a farmer’s cart hidden under a pile of dung the jobber dressed as a farmer oh new houses The dream of instant wealth The failing confidence in paper Everyone knows that a piece of cardboard Held up in the sun (will cast a shadow) “After watching intently for some time I turned . . .”

Conversion

Paraded through the streets with their picks and shovels and sent to the ports to be shipped for America “The very refuse of the streets” dressed as miners oh After looking for some time intently and steadily The belief in the great wealth of that region Stillness of dark figures not in the oppressive heat a lesson Stopped payment in specie malversation 113

“par les règles de l’algèbre” Black letters have been seen to look red in the evening light Diminished as instance marriages Those caught converting the notes into gold, plate, or jewelry “When anyone thinks he can see this phenomenon very clearly, he should hold brilliantly coloured paper flowers close to the real ones . . .” Given in

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figures

Spoke of a Blueprint

The actual blue [here are some possible names for it] vanishing into comparison replaced by ocean sky lake river time of day and so forth always farther off like her eyes which were like which was like spoke of the faint white webbing of lines meaning load bearing walls if you could read it spoke of someone finally serious having stepped through a doorway that didn’t exist until you stepped through it a trail map where a long ago accident left its indelible faint white trace in the skin a kind of plan spoke of someone speaking of wasted time manganese cerulean azure prussian midnight the measurements spoke of a translation of a translation of a translation always farther off of will and the theory of where she would be entirely isolated reaching out as if to touch spoke of an edifice of water a building like a lake or section of river turned on its side imagine the play of images sky passing over storms over the edges for instance clouds blossoming and dissipating paean to ephemera and mere appearance 115

speaking always of a blueprint a passage a structure of water her voice ragged her breath harsh literally dying literally of [here are some possible names for it] thirst spoke of getting down at last to the real work ragged voice words abruptly broken off the actual name of the place vanishing removed from reference by those for whom it had always been sacred sign of a violent encounter light spoke of nothing not allowed to speak except within this structure where the past left its intelligible mark if you could read it wrote out her anger and sorrow her loneliness her disappointment where no one could see it spoke of the fragile almost tentative seeming white lines drowning in all that blue finally seen only as a delaying tactic spoke of the weight of the word “once” a blue both dark and flat with a deep bitterness wrote in block letters so maybe it is slowly drifting through the dissolving net the trace of her thought thought spoke of the space of the page and the space of a life and at last having waited so long those for whom the site had significance cutting the links leaves a blank 116

canvas under a tree pollen and dust sifting across the surface pine needles and leaves swirling down to catch a moment in the texture of the rough cloth shadows of leaves and needles appeared and vanished whispered something about the future a blue [here are some possible names] into which everything will at last

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Should Have Ended

“And been erased.” No further explanations. Never “gem-like,” never “the silver Screen” not even as (mocking) gesture. Suddenly someone remembers— That’s how it begins—suddenly someone remembers. Should have ended Earlier, before “Imagined”—that much is clear. Here is a complete list At last, but it’s over, the time for such a word. These are the proofs. Suddenly Someone remembers that she can’t work the gate, the daughter: she can’t Work the mechanism, so she’ll be imprisoned there, if anything happens To the mother. Should have ended “Would have hovered in the air”? The unstable floor of the attic shifted: it would have been easy to fall, to pitch head first out the narrow entrance and—missing the ladder—land on the edge of the bathtub, the heavy box of journals upended, loose pages of unsent letters and long confessions of sorrow, jealousies, loneliness, dashed out. The paper was old and cheap and had yellowed. Sometimes she wrote with pencil. Words that seemed clear enough once were now hard to make out. Teeter. A loose board flipped up, emptied of its balancing load, and it seemed as if her furious spirit hovered, the tense essence of her frustration in the close air an almost anger. (Guilt, she’ d said, is anger . . . whose anger.) (Dear Why not even earlier? Here to recount the complete splinter of a larger Dream who recalls that the daughter could be trapped and rushes to the house. The mother has died, and the daughter—stuck with the body and unwilling Or unable to recognize what has occurred—is still tending her. Should Have. The mother naked, livid body very clean, expressionless face Carefully and delicately made up (all done by the daughter). Ended. There would have been a time for such details in this world. Matter. Maybe even earlier, on “dead leaves and shards.”

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She would say, “I can’t believe how much you remember!” In the dream the “I” was male, some admixture of self and other, Belatedly rushing to rescue the daughter. She can’t work the gate, Can’t see her mother is no longer living. The speaker, the agent, The rescuer attempts to convince the daughter she needs to leave: You need to travel, to take a trip, get out of here. The mother, Lying on the bed, nods and smiles at this, Yes dear . . . — At which point one white, pearl-like maggot appears. Nearly two weeks of trying to stay alive, hoping to be discovered. The proofs arrive, “starts” someone typed in, instead of stars. Just one—and the sudden knowledge that there are others.

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The Motif Modifies Space

1. Filled with a liquid element responsive even outside it Framing the endless loop assuming dimensions In the absence of the horizon not that sort of hope beyond impressionism “broken off from the sky” And explaining the inner life

mourning by reference

This surface

monument to time and trace

This deliberately accidental surface intimate As a child I nearly drowned in Echo Park lake

intimates

Atmosphere also immense part of the on-going explanation adding on to the distance mist invades the work missed has begun to dissolving in the mouth “I am going to explain” the promise premise mise en scène 2. A rainy season “a rainy season” sideways sliced the gleaming edges image after image

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under the scarring to try to discern drowned car smashed church steeple in the yard boat on the roof unsteady change the meaty smear of the heart an ear or an eye in the still water for what trapped in the repetition trying to wash us away won’t come out hope the rough outlines as if it moved or some other uncertainty moved in it 3. (From syllable to sound) the pixels windowlate square pieces of image vanish like slices of served up flat cake let them eat popular culture party of the story crumbs of expressive intimacy on a smudged glop of face

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The said slows slurs toward grrrr grrrr grrrr growl warning given too late what I was going to write here not on this surface not in this light what I was going to say something else a glowing orange smoldering at the charred coasts of that overcast burning out years of that same sunset then sky of ash vague light without source the desk and the chair thrown out in the dead yard with everything else moldering mud-smeared soaked (sees the pile of violin cases and stops the car, opens first one then another mushy stinking velvet-lined in each the drowned instrument gold shine of old wood polished and polished and polished beneath the sticky grime under the bloom of black mold reaches in to lift them out heavy drenched they break at the neck) 4. Let us eat the deep sparkling scratch in the disc we believe to be the cause of this stasis what caused the scratch

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5. “Hello? Hello? Hello? Yeah I’m here. The car’s gone. I said the car’s gone: someone took the car. Everything’s gone: the car’s gone the house is gone. I said gone. There’s nuthin’ here for you now better stay where y’ at.” 6. Literally “it all” (beyond impressionism) the surface (past post-) little cubes Bright searing green blocks light up in a line Through the actors’ doubled faces As the angry words break up Stutter of stutter of stutter of hot movement caw caw caught t t t A ruby slash appears vanishes Secret chaos out of which skitter of narrative frantic little advent windows open as if on the pure hot flames of the hell where the body dissolved open shut open shut open charnel house of the medium itself shot through the action hauls the body out fake body falling apart all reference (Descending a staircase) in layers of traced faces and memorized gestures they fight the flight of hands recalled from previous and future frames rising around them like frightened doves like plane after plane of overlapping light

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7. What you didn’t know was only a mirror you know was only a mirror now it breaks it breaks shatters falls cracks open the face of a beautiful woman half gone and under the luminous skin the featureless dark repeat dangerous angles of vision chance the restless collage shifting

a mirror maze flickering images kaleidoscope

describing the story takes over let them eat denouement the current tugging a body shot in the back tied to the fence drifts off in the flooded streets on the wavering line between the real and the reflected broken tree broken tree

smashed house upside down truck smashed house upside down truck

awash sunset up to the eaves burns out breaks up the surface remembers it’s surface slides off back into the pure hot flux one fire the sky broken into moments we drown in it 124

Even in My Dreams the Knowledge

I’ll never see her again even as I’m seeing her dreamed edge of dream “certain aspects of the representation” a quick glitter among grasses at the edge of the road then the wide expanse of the gulf itself watching her walk away in my dreams untraceable exact instant when looking for words becomes remembering a phrase recalled as memory in the dream named only a and waking “wavering flight over the depths” transition the meaning

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Ghost Mist (summer 2006 pacific coast highway)

This vagueness in the air Shifts Thin then To the point of blankness Thick Turns thought back Slowed as this road On itself twists no Regrets yes perhaps Nothing I’d change I wouldn’t change This Cypress and cliff in grey on grey Silhouette Glimpsed hill of silvery Grass fence road bright Broken line meant to be Still visible in this still Visible in this Dulled glass A long glance back down the black Fog-blurred coast That Past is not this Present but what Keeps time From time loosens

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Almost melts now in a damp Salt Slur of obscuring air Dissolving rocks Fading flash of white Once known Come home In gusts

as guessed

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Evaporation / Condensation

On April 15th, 1802 (a “threatening, misty” day, according to Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal), the Wordsworth siblings took a walk. Later William used his sister’s record of the outing in his writing and revising of what would become a well-known poem. In process for several years, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” transforms that source in significant ways. Though Dorothy, like her brother, anthropomorphized the daffodils, she sees them as weary as well as “gay,” and she moves through “tossed” and “reeled” to get to “danced.” Her brother’s famous “breeze” was in Dorothy’s account a “furious” wind that “blew directly” to the flowers after taking not only her own but her companion’s “breath.” But William is not winded, though his breathing (in rhyming sestets) might seem labored to us. The speaker of the poem travels light as well as “lonely,” the author having decided not to include his sister in the experience he recounts. Why erase that presence, why tame the wind and number the flowers, why insist the unwilled motion be legible only as pleasure; these questions came to me accompanied by others, about gender and genre, appropriation and originality, and the relationship of art to life. Influenced by Picasso’s variations on Las Meninas, and Susan Lori-Parks’s The America Play, an on-going study of intertextuality and what Lori-Parks calls “repetition and revision” became (after the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina) an exploration of voice, embodiment, entitlement, and contested experience in the charged space of cover versions, mash-ups, and sampling. Is it live or . . . is a question it would cost too much to finish: is it, where the past resounds, allusion or is it looting? Trapping birds and sometimes stealing a bird “Which was the captive of another’s toil”1 causes Wordsworth to hear “Low breathings coming after me, and sounds / of undistinguishable motion.”2 For the poet, it seems, the threatened discovery of theft eases loneliness, as a mysterious accompaniment is produced—if only by the echo of his own flight and breath. Among the many sources of inspiration for this collection Tessa 129

Rumsey’s The Return Message and Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely are crucial, along with the paintings of Cy Twombly; a bibliography would include Hate Crime by Joyce King and Long Dark Road by Ricardo C. Ainslie as well as The Invention of Clouds by Richard Hamblyn and Luke Howard’s Seven Lectures on Meteorology. Preparing for a solo show at the Morris Graves Museum, the painter Ingrid Nickelsen set out to work on a landscape featuring a particular rock formation sacred to local Native American tribes, a site that Graves had also made his subject. Badly hurt within hours of her arrival and immobilized for almost two weeks—alone on the trail—she focused her creativity and intelligence on survival, and wrote her will on a Forest Service map. Over the blue line of the represented river, among instructions as to the distribution of money and property, she wrote a few sentences about her situation, ending: “I’ve run out of tricks.” Notes 1. The Prelude (i. 320–24). 2. Cf. Raymond Dexter Havens, The Mind of a Poet, on the visionary and “fostering power of fear” (40–41).

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N e w C a l i for n i a P oet r y Edited by

Robert Hass Calvin Bedient Brenda Hillman Forrest Gander

For, by Carol Snow Enola Gay, by Mark Levine Selected Poems, by Fanny Howe Sleeping with the Dictionary, by Harryette Mullen Commons, by Myung Mi Kim The Guns and Flags Project, by Geoffrey G. O’Brien Gone, by Fanny Howe Why/Why Not, by Martha Ronk A Carnage in the Lovetrees, by Richard Greenfield The Seventy Prepositions, by Carol Snow Not Even Then, by Brian Blanchfield Facts for Visitors, by Srikanth Reddy Weather Eye Open, by Sarah Gridley Subject, by Laura Mullen This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, by Juliana Spahr The Totality for Kids, by Joshua Clover The Wilds, by Mark Levine I Love Artists, by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Harm., by Steve Willard Green and Gray, by Geoffrey G. O’Brien The Age of Huts (compleat), by Ron Silliman Selected Poems, 1974–2006: it’s go in horizontal, by Leslie Scalapino rimertown/an atlas, by Laura Walker Ours, by Cole Swensen Virgil and the Mountain Cat: Poems, by David Lau

Sight Map: Poems, by Brian Teare Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, by Keith Waldrop R’s Boat, by Lisa Robertson Green is the Orator, by Sarah Gridley Writing the Silences, by Richard O. Moore Voyager, by Srikanth Reddy Dark Archive, by Laura Mullen Metropole, by Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Text and display Garamond Premier Pro Compositor BookMatters, Berkeley Printer and binder Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group ■