Embedded Files
LINK OR UNLINK
LINK OR UNLINK
A cataract or blooming child swells affect
in her throat skin lesions or the consummate stage untells
affiliation over or anxiously paced
her questioning or scald or market of defense
impermeable or
already as ready or squalid underneath the indignant cross
lacerating an equivocal condition or site section
imagined to contain henceforth its drip
a meager void sure among the silly adventurers morbid in relay
or stripped of foreseeable grass
or linked
as if by the permutations of dream
and thought
exponents gain or had they trimmed it back
had they
allowed the same
as man walking up and down
its drop holistic
not smoke
not the musical invasion from behind a wall
oblique angle of yellow fiber
girl fighting with her quilt
that quiet demeanor string
a white snail on a white placard
hung around her neck shell frequently touched
method of appraisal allotted daily.
NIGHT NEWS WITH FAKE ZEBRA
For Michael JooNIGHT NEWS WITH FAKE ZEBRA
Let us move more quickly, night,
now night, star crusted, opulent.
The indictment of thought is
an opal's smooth version.
Guard our sensations, be copious, or
at least perform adequate
vistas. I saw a pair of eagles
from the train. The train trains on.
They, their sitting.
Night is longer than the sitting,
We, gathered and copious.
The eagles, a pair.
I warrant the arrest of the boy
Who shot another boy in this sad.
In this sad, would you have said no?
Bickering, passing the gun, a game
of pass the gun.
There are gangs.
This is not a lesson.
A transformation of the subject
into another subject. Not to insist.
Velvet Revolution, Velvet Underground.
Lou, hello Lou? Can you hear?
I am here in a dark church
Imagining an improvised history
as if channeling the news!
The eagles sit at the edge of the river.
The camera is out of earshot. Jack
Spicer is about to speak
into the nearest phenomenon
while the deer
while the dear
spelled d/e /a/ r
halts naturalism
and a new equation
only you in the pews can solve.
Are we lost among our subjects?
The lone bobcat
Andrew and I saw
traverses
an ancient and incendiary
commotion. Hunting season
under the big tent.
And then there was a magician
strolling along in broad daylight
with something up his sleeve.
There is a silver zebra
on a silver tray in a gallery in New York.
Ann Lauterbach is a poet and critic from New York. Her most recent collection is Or to Begin Again (Penguin 2009). A book of prose essays, The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience was published in 2005. She is co-directs Writing in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, where she is Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature. She is a Visiting Core Critic in sculpture at the Yale School of Art.]
Copyright © 2010 by Ann Lauterbach, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
Report abuse