who know nothing of our latest crimes
stealth, lies, cruelty, women stoned, girls stolen, one abuse after—
A doll, let’s say again a doll, dressed in her conceit dress,
flounced, elaborately tied, buttons, bows,
tiny underthings, smalls and smaller smalls, white socks,
black shoes with laces. It
does not age, it fades, molds, rips in the ways that beset things.
Is this a lyric? Can you tell me if this is a lyric?
It is about a doll, which is a thing and also an image, one
kind of thing image. Anyway, there is a doll.
A “female,” or else a cross-dresser, doubtful, but
an interesting idea for an image.
You would have to lift up her petticoats.
Is this the same doll? Is it archival?
Is it part of a collection, people have collections of dolls,
they are serial doll lovers.
I have had many dolls, and many lovers.
Does this make me a lyric poet?
Am I singing now, the way the doll might have sung
something from “Guys and Dolls,” a musical,
in which there were lyrics I once knew by heart.
If I know things by heart, does this make me a lyric poet?
If I substitute the word “God” for doll, does that make me a religious poet?
“They are serial God lovers.”
“I have had many gods, and many lovers.”
“Something from Guys and Gods, a musical.”
“Am I singing now, the way God might have sung?”
In this substitution, a gull flies out,
and it cries real tears. Does this make me a nature poet,
a metaphysical poet? A god is an intellectual thing.
M. AND F. AT THE K.G.B.
Trickily absorbed into ekphrastic juvenalia
shot from the hip. Think I’ll listen to Emmy Lou
before the fervor of the andante.
Shostakovich, plural and harmonic
but repeated over there, in the mud
with young boys and their tools, their faces
sweating with boundary.
Old goat’s lust for the worldly arena.
A woman of emendation, a man of domestic glass
came to speak to us before our trip,
upbraid our vague dilemmas
and such quotidian enunciations as the Dow
beyond what we might have witnessed
in the early homespun riot
before the colossal carried us off into infrastructure
inverting the usual designation of
girl-boy trials—she
tracks the insignia of thought, thinks the bleachers
will hold, he would open each flower, blossom
in the appellant of a kindly disciple: Moses, one shoe off,
rises to the tinsel bush. She is
recursive, belonging to an addition, like a
good logic, marries Mayakovsky to the sublime
as she submits her laws to our court.
His entreaty to come through the kitchen door
rivals concordance, and so
they agree: trot trot trot to a different beat.
PRECISION TUNING
Curtailed argument for small alert
less than alert contaminated
singular
came as thought
thought contrived instances of good
the good night captured
illegally captured drawn smoke
without looking up smoke rises through slots
drastic in the slotted spoon or held
Annunciation’s drastic fidelity
still following as faithful thought
hurt its lungs, slept.
Such incipience must conjure new ordeals
ordeals specific to this
this being troubled by sanction
so that the sanctions come from above
as if rain, from above but superimposed.
The superior army imposed
the prohibited calm
those who erase the calm rims of Enlightenment
those who spend secular gold, light
those who omit light
who wear the feeble shawl of sobriety
his mother in shawls
father in custody
the family custodian arranged chronologically
without deviation children first second third
trays of numbered slaughter.
XYZ PLUS MINUS
X
( ) settles in
mirage person go! go!
be punctuated be
adroit
( ) settles
dead one dead three
thou sand thou one in the desert
hi!
( ) settles
why these should be removed
and these later
this plus this
you have too many in your program
you have too many ( ) in your ( ).
and the exception to this rule is? And this object?
We recommend you
furnish ( ) with another
and that you buy only what is
transparent to the
the eye.
Is the eye a good judge?
Y
Knot.
Aha, a little
jokey pun.
Jokes are a good thing
under conditions of the non-joke.
To untie the knot.
Now?
The heart is
awakened by a small
mis-
take or de-
lay or am-
big-
u-
ity. Do you want to save
the ex-
changes you made
to X?
Z
Let’s do the numbers!
“Care, community, comfort”
Dollar value?
Wrong letter, wrong ( ).
Offshore dummy corporations,
ancient, ex-
patriot,
ex-
change rates, moving
with cash, suspicion,
American practice.
Paradise.
cf Milton PL Book IV
Satan
Hell himself.
Gates?
Brand name angels.
Everything fell.
Z-1
But not in love.
This is the post-temporal, post-serial, post-
A B Cs. Meeters & greeters
not allowed to cross ( ).
Z-2
Some kind of rent relief.
No one thinks that will happen this year.
Music.
Z-3
Good Investment:
Bed, Bath, and ( ).
Z-4
Announce personal hymn
to make a chapel
against wholesale ( )
devolution
( )
A cigarette burning down at high speed
But there are X thousand people inside that cigarette.
“Well what’s it like?”
“Children.” ( )
retail or retell
Z-5
More or
less.
Z-6
The ancient came with me it was nothing I loved him
4.2 miles a brief stretch in the car he could not speak.
R/ENDINGS
Votes destined to again unearth
mirth in the fabric of the morsel. Please do not underline
design my speechless-
ness, not while I am still
ill in the cave’s
nave, resisting normal urges
purges to get on with things
out of time
lines, despite the impromptu gathering with ripe pears and cheese
ease. I imagine the clocks
rock, that the remainder is still
drill sweltering, water arcing
larking across the twilight
blight, the tourists
forest’s crumbled immensity
density. Things continue to be planned ahead
dread but I no longer want to risk the materials, and so have taken
mistaken, fumbling, hoping for tact
fact to be productive, if not the detachment and humor we have come
dumb to expect.
“Awash” in the inscrutable palette of roses
roses unscented in the few
new perfection. Music rides
hides against honky-tonk beer
cheer. The moon
soon half full, never half empty. The second hand
lands outside the circle and
demand threatens to usurp the young road rats on the bus
us, all our distractions seem arbitrarily chosen like a form
norm of nostalgia in an indigo drawing: Whistler’s fog. The heart’s
art, caged in its gauze, making a poor sound. Gears slip and now
Dow it seems is being held up by so
low many cheats, instantly assembled, not one exactly like another,
others interchangeable. If a part hissed
mist, then it was hissing for good. Were we dangling, inevitably a delay
fade. Not anything I want, since delay’s advent
meant sorrow. In truth, I have left, so
go little by little, it seems as if
life is a refutation. There is no one to comment or to abjure,
lure the little enlightened spots, herds
not words exactly, but what refuses to be underlined or condensed. One
sun steals the day, this for
more examples, the fog and the police car
star sitting above the browning grass and thought
wrought under the table. The cat is not dead but her eyes now wide
died with wonder. I think it must be wonder.
Everything quiet now in the zone
clone of retrieval. Through casts of zeal
real life narrows as a pipe carrying gray water to the zero gauge
age of reproduction in its video mirror
error’s blind truce among those who still matter
latter loved, without courage, traced
faced with the fools of redemption who came easily out of the widow
ditto the indictment, ditto the harms
farms and the industrial park
dark collapse. Call this our time
I’m lonely for the integrity of sacred life, not religion, but love’s
troves, its coil around sex
text comes after an ordeal of risk, the way we went back
lack or crisis because we had neglected the loom
room I suppose, even as the inventions are all for a violent solution
revolution, quiet as a street at dawn, in a city, a city so sadly
badly used.
POSTSCRIPT
And then these attenuated thistles.
Spoken from the sink, from the adamant.
There is no room, no
more room. Stuffed to the brink.
Object dispersed, whole into—
agitated, fielded. Throw us a flake.
Up to here. Up to the
mouth’s bright contrast, its
sponsored aggressive silence, held
by interlocking dots.
Chapel among the drawings.
Trees up to their boughs in snow.
Or this brim, above the giddy mechanics
of instruments, their oiled
dissonant animation, the clock,
men with their staples
behind sliding doors in white hats,
the copper clad wall.
Taking these in
toward hibernating sorrow
things having been seen, persons
having drifted from view
pink repercussions of the metal,
a jacket, a cup.
Ann Lauterbach was born and grew up in New York City. After college (University of Wisconsin, Madison), she attended Columbia University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, but moved to London before completing her MA in English literature. She lived in London for seven years, working variously in publishing and arts institutions. On her return, she worked for a number of years in art galleries in New York before she began teaching. She has taught at Brooklyn College, Columbia, Iowa, Princeton, and at the City College of New York and Graduate Center of CUNY. Since 1991 she has been Director of Writing in the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, where she has been, since 1999, Ruth and David Schwab II Professor of Languages and Literature. Lauterbach has received a number of awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986 and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 1993. She lives in New York City and in Germantown, New York.
Penguin Poets
TED BERRIGAN
Selected Poems
The Sonnets
PHILIP BOOTH
Lifelines
JIM CARROLL
Fear of Dreaming
Void of Course
New and Selected Poems 1974–2004
Practical Gods
BARBARA CULLY
Desire Reclining
DIANE DI PRIMA
Loba
STUART DISCHELL
Dig Safe
STEPHEN DOBYNS
Mystery, So Long
Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides
The Porcupine’s Kisses
ROGER FANNING
Homesick
AMY GERSTLER
Crown of Weeds
Ghost Girl
Medicine
Nerve Storm
DEBORA GREGER
Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters
God
Western Art
ROBERT HUNTER
Sentinel
BARBARA JORDAN
Trace Elements
MARY KARR
Viper Rum
JACK KEROUAC
Book of Blues
Book of Haikus
JOANNE KYGER
As Ever
ANN LAUTERBACH
Hum
If in Time
On a Stair
PHYLLIS LEVIN
Mercury
WILLIAM LOGAN
Macbeth in Venice
Night Battle
Vain Empires
DEREK MAHON
Selected Poems
MICHAEL MCCLURE
Huge Dreams: San Francisco and Beat Poems
CAROL MUSKE
An Octave Above Thunder
ALICE NOTLEY
The Descent of Alette
Disobedience
Mysteries of Small Houses
LAWRENCE RAAB
The Probable World
Visible Signs
PATTIANN ROGERS
Generations
STEPHANIE STRICKLAND
V
ANNE WALDMAN
Kill or Cure
Marriage: A Sentence
Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble
JAMES WELCH
Riding the Earthboy 40
PHILIP WHALEN
Overtime: Selected Poems
ROBERT WRIGLEY
Lives of the Animals
Reign of Snakes
JOHN YAU
Borrowed Love Poems
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ALSO BY ANN LAUTERBACH
Also by Ann Lauterbach
If in Time: Selected Poems 1975–2000
On a Stair
And for Example
Clamor
Before Recollection
Many Times, But Then
The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience
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Ann Lauterbach, Hum