Issue 5: Jane Lewty

from Field Manual

4a).

Made in the wakening to a quiet

(little in themselves

little all put together)

interstitial things

in a world of locutions

those incoming combined malleable

true or false cognates either way

Each a mark in a cable, like----

4b).

---Cleveland, Antioch Hotel

where trains pause in the hallway   

strange underpass, strange attractor

hotel, its bodies fall to the street

in a guttering flock  

& you not caring your voice

was thrown always

you besieged, besieged.                                          You heard the name Antioch/Antakya

heard how the museum of art rebuilt that “lost ancient city” & you never went to the exhibit

All you could do was sit & drink

in the bar: called Halite Bar         the rim of a glass salty

& think of halite rock

its concoidal fractures     millionfold a seam beneath you                                              

heard [sat, drinking]              how the crusader Princes of Antioch were emptytitled in the end

how the Antioch Chalice was not used at the Last Supper.

                                           ∞

 If you sink an object in Lake Erie

it will emerge beaded, a bonediamond.          Someone’s skull like a spiderweb, imagine---

hard as the pavement trace of white outside                 

and hard as downtown shuttered--

its comeback failed--- its nerve gone---centre all dug out/a blanched airpocket

with a countercross/score of limbs/lines on the real skyline

& numbness      a numb pale scoria lifting/falling                     

And still so hard         that Antioch, Ohio

was the last same place before now. And you sat in the same way, same-seeming hotel

in the vitreous        lustre       of you                             [yourself, sitting]

in a lean-to room      with a touchup and half-grey smile

What a battle what a bad winter a bad journey

To vacant shapes in rocksalt                                  cordless faces on the wall.

5a).

Winter solstice                   occurs at the instant when the Sun's position in the sky is at its
greatest angular distance on the other side of the equatorial plane from the observer's
hemisphere.

lengthening nights and shortening days

band of the Zodiac (zōdiakos kuklos) is (always) at an oblique angle (loksos)

positioned between the tropical circles and equinoctial circle touching each of the
tropical circles at one point. This Zodiac has a determinable width of 8°--

Solstice  fr. LL sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still). Inter--

It can fall in the middle or end or start the world as I know it again         (depending where I

5b).

Hear basso continuo hear away:

A canon looping

around a moon

(moon a well-lagged water tank)              Hear its ratio

A major dominant, B minor submediant – 3rd below the first

note of a scale--          note called “blue-for-alice”

gage-flung        all music here is gage-flung     no tone

no passing or state

of escape in cadence

or in, as I remember, Satellite Osumi

It burned up in ’03.

                          Numb sidling creature                                a shadowcone

a sometime perigee/or apigee (that is, wherever the elliptic sits)

its chord the gap

of entering edge & trailing edge of air

And earth –your earth--what that

stands for—for once

the fixed middle--                      

pulling a stray flux line in a stray chain of parts--                     

Osumi        burned up       Wrong circuit type:    was it a ‘tether/tundra/killer’ (socalled)

or simply ‘escape’ satellite

straining away, thin as filament silk

though I am sure I saw it static stayed lightly quivering east-to-west, synchronous with us

an analemma in the sky 

appearing in the thought-up angle

between orbit’s vector and band of solstice 

A way to equinox is the 8      unitless

like a mug tilted turned twice.       Hear its phasing--

round rota summer is incumen in.

Ate/Atë

Pound speaks into the radio

He is the new radio

A tubetype amplifier/dummy with a moulded throat

He is not an archive

He is the quivering in a room

A signal wave lightly dominant

Brought forth. Disc-less/wire-less

Pulled down sound, far sound, human and stellar

Lay down

Went home

Couldn’t go home

Pulled down intermittence

Showed what was in there

(Nothing)

Showed that a person who passes

From one state to another

Is in danger

And emanates danger

Jane Lewty is the co-editor of Broadcasting Modernism (University Press of Florida, 2009) and Pornotopias: Image, Apocalypse, Desire (Litteraria Pragensia, 2010). Her poems, reviews and essays have appeared, or will be appearing in, The Blackwell Companion to James Joyce (2008), Blazevox, MAKE, Otoliths, The Laurel Review, The Iowa Review, VOLT and others. She has been the recipient of an Iowa Arts Fellowship and the Ailene Barger Barnes Award from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (2009). She has held faculty positions at University College London, the University of Northern Iowa, and currently teaches English Literature at the University of Amsterdam.

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