ALSO BY ANN LAUTERBACH
Poems
Or to Begin Again
Hum
If in Time: Selected Poems 1975–2000
On a Stair
And for Example
Clamor
Before Recollection
Many Times, but Then
Prose
The Given & The Chosen
The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience
BOOKS WITH ARTISTS
Thripsis
(with Joe Brainard)
A Clown, Some Colors, A Doll, Her Stories, A Song, A Moonlit Cover
(with Ellen Phelan)
How Things Bear Their Telling
(with Lucio Pozzi)
Greeks
(with Jan Groover and Bruce Boice)
Sacred Weather
(with Louisa Chase)
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Penguin Books 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Ann Lauterbach
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lauterbach, Ann
[Poems. Selections]
Under the Sign / Ann Lauterbach.
pages cm. — (Penguin Poets)
Poems.
ISBN 978-0-14-312418-4
ISBN 978-1-101-62730-3 (eBook)
I. Title.
PS3562.A844U53 2013
811'.54—dc23 2013021794
In memory of
Leslie Scalapino
Stacy Doris
and for our students
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author gratefully acknowledges the editors of the following journals, in which some of these poems, often in earlier versions, were first published: The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Critical Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, Maggy, Vanitas, and Formes Poétiques Contemporaines.
Thanks also to Paul Slovak for patience and perseverance, and Anna Moschovakis, Marina van Zuylen, Michael Brenson, and Nancy Shaver for their enduring friendship and help along the way.
CONTENTS
Also by Ann Lauterbach
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
I. GLYPH
A READING
TESTING THE WATERS
GLYPH
THE TRANSLATOR’S DILEMMA
ENIGMA OF THE CAT
TRIPTYCH (VAN EYCK)
UNTITLED (PORTRAIT)
LANDSCAPE WITHOUT VIEW
NIGHT NEWS WITH FAKE ZEBRA
AFTER NEWTOWN
UGLY SONNET
WORLD CUP
MEANWHILE, STORM
IL PLEUT
DOMESTIC MODERNISM
UTENSIL
HARBOR SONG
BASEMENT TAPE
UNDER THE SIGN
ALICE IN OCTOBER
THE TEARS OF EROS
II. TASK: TO OPEN
III. DEAR INSTRUCTOR
UNTITLED (SPOON)
OF SPIRITS
LETTER (IN PRAISE OF PROMISCUITY)
UNTITLED (AGAINST PERFECTION)
ZERO & A
A PLAN
UNTITLED (FATE)
A FOLD IN TIME
AT/OR (RAÚL ZURITA)
UNTITLED (THE DISINHERITED)
BEAUTY AND CONSOLATION (RICHARD RORTY)
UNTITLED (THE RIVER)
UNTITLED (THE NEUTRAL)
TO THE GIVEN
CLASSICAL AUGURY
SOME ELEMENTS OF THE POEM
SONG OF THE O (EMERSON “CIRCLES”)
About the Author
Penguin Poets
People wish to be settled; only so far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I.
GLYPH
A READING
1.
Mutable stipend, junk
saturated in the moldy
room with a thin blue rug.
The pivot has some mystery
as in the dream: huge
white birds flowering down.
The morning was brilliant
but then junk
broke loose to scatter sky.
Was I meant to consult
this tissue of meaningless harbingers?
2.
Make no mistake: behind
a curtain, a continuum.
Blink, sun.
The bugs are back.
The skin is salty.
Behind the curtain, a
mistake or just old dark
thrown across space.
I have an inky drawing of a hairy
stick pressing wind.
Lovely, now, the milky shade.
Behind the curtain, junk
orbits and a serenade to
those who keep watch while the ditch
fills with lost things. The distant river
flirts with light. The water is alight.
3.
In the dust of a former
moon, an abridgment.
If this were prose, little
agreements would obtain,
and you could turn toward the missed
like an angel on a fence.
I mean a bird, a bird
in prose. The spun ordeal
arises as a missing object, its
body enclosed so to be
a convenient newsy thing,
the dead soldier’s spouse.
What exactly was intended
to be kept in this regressive frame?
Some figure? Some petty marker?
She will trade her mother’s
ring for passage. Let her come aboard.
Veet! Veet! The blue jay’s yell
is hollow the way that light blinds.
TESTING THE WATERS
1.
What world?
asked the boy, alarmed
to be asked
to say when or
what might be repeated
the soldier’s word
the doctor’s word, how
world might be
known by saying.
2.
Gone now from the said
radical child
hears only an orgy of hunches
under the swollen noise.
Fair trade. Liaison. Betrayal.
Some of us, some of them,
no accounting for response
as in the screen palace
we count our dead.
Blind to this or that
futurist momen
t
there are so many moments untold.
Who then arranged
this episode? Who then
killed the child?
3.
I’m getting good at sailing
unaccompanied through time
holding on to delay
forfeiting
the familiar bridge
across a mirage
betrayal
whose voice concedes
and is still recalled
even as it bends
under the weight
of forgetfulness.
I’m getting good at counting
and at seeing
the view from the
window of a dream.
4.
We hunker down
under the pines
and refuse to recall.
Fire! Excellent inferno!
Another cosmos passes through.
The mild noises of night
are a form of waiting
and then the dream
touches and reminds like a hand.
This reveals, and so a weary ambit
collapses the foreground scene.
GLYPH
It was, she said, her favorite color.
Fine, I said, have it your way.
He said he loved small things.
How small? I asked. No answer.
A book arrived in the mail I did not order.
The leaves, many of them, were falling.
Perhaps, I thought, it was sent just in case.
It was, she said, her favorite color.
The dog barked. He was new to the neighborhood.
Fine, I said, have it your way.
He said he loved small things.
A book arrived in the mail I did not order.
Today was more or less full of surprises.
Something in the mix of habit and hope.
Surprise, she said, is a kind of wind.
Perhaps, I thought, it was sent just in case.
To what or to whom are you referring?
I refer, she said, to the dog.
How small? I asked. No answer.
The leaves, many of them, were falling.
The dog barked. He was new to the neighborhood.
It was, she said, her favorite color.
Do animals forget? I asked.
The leaves, many of them, were falling.
Something in the mix of habit and hope.
A book arrived in the mail I did not order.
How small? I asked. No answer.
Today was more or less full of surprises.
to Celia Bland
THE TRANSLATOR’S DILEMMA
To foretell an ordinary mission, with fewer words.
With fewer, more ordinary, words.
Words of one syllable, for example.
For example: step and sleeve.
These are two favorites, among many.
Many can be found if I look closely.
But even if I look closely, surely a word is not
necessarily here, in the foreground.
I see an edge of a paper, I see orange.
I see words and I see things. An old story,
nothing to foretell the ordinary mission.
I see “her winter” and I see
And even the Romans fear her by now.
Are these words in
translation or barriers to translation?
I see John and an open book, open to a day
in August. I am feeling defeated
among these sights, as if I will never find
either sleeve or step. These ordinary
pleasurable words, attached to
ordinary pleasurable things, as if
to find them is to say I am
announcing criteria. Step, sleeve,
you are invited to come up and be within
ordinary necessities. Staircase. Coat.
ENIGMA OF THE CAT
1.
She walked along. She looked out.
Nothing here, among these, resembles.
She went on. There were lists,
objects, names, but still
nothing resembling. The sky
was a kind of sorrow, cold
and stained a pale sunless gray,
it too did not resemble. And she,
her lies adrift over the humdrum,
thought to turn back but by then
as you already know was lost.
2.
The wrist’s illness, having
touched the spider,
erupting as grid
sewn before and after the fact.
The dark hall, the walls,
the imagined street
where the forecast
elicits a halo
broken from the entire—
cusp, turn, rim.
3.
Cat sleeps through world.
4.
Come then, undo the truss.
Mayhem waits like a sting.
Look down into the face puddle,
look across into the alarm.
There is a boat on a roof,
an image of a boat
on a roof. All else is heaved
as if giving birth on a floor.
Have you come this far?
Will you pass the wet caul?
5.
Cat is spared from angel.
6.
Mute extravagance
trapped under tarp.
Wave good-bye or
establish some rules
despite the glare.
Look down, there are things
dumped into a pail of glue.
This belt is way too tight.
These buttons, coins,
crumbs, a derelict parade
awash, happy tramp drowned.
7.
Cat plays with dead bird.
8.
You cannot avoid
the information.
No one cares what you
say unless you say
the information.
No one cares
what you care about
unless it is
the information
turned toward
a vocabulary
as if written.
9.
Cat turns in the chair and subsides.
10.
For what do you search?
The quick being
out of which
the conceptual flares
like a toy bomb.
The medieval crescent
born from prolific
reason.
Are you ready?
After the after, please
throw away
the photographs.
We know the image
came to nothing.
11.
Cat at the threshold.
12.
To dream is
to proliferate
in the opening that is
always shut. The long self
drawn into patterns of shadow,
girls and boys nameless
across the playground.
Stranded here
in the partial real. Ground
parts on
lacerations of the newly good.
The stone is mentioned.
A law is invoked.
The event floats in from afar.
13.
Cat waits until dark to go out.
TRIPTYCH (VAN EYCK)
1.
The woman
with a child on her lap
&n
bsp; sitting on rugs
what is she doing
there
in the middle
the day
might always be cold
March light
what is she doing
sitting with a child
on her lap
long drapes
behind
and rugs
like wings
or feathers
feathery rugs
alive in the cold
March light
flat as the moon
at dusk
the cold
rakes
blue plumes
into
traversing
signals
aside
and because
it can never be
early enough
she is always
sitting
aside
in wait.
2.
Mal, mal,
trivial thwart.
Stop this
glare, stop
goading the ill
into consequence,
the extra
bloom
unheralded
by day or by night.
Go off
into a woody scene
and take
the painted epilogue
with you.
Burn it for heat
and burn the
currency of emeralds
mistaken
for new life.
3.
If no time’s
not want
stay and
renovate
traced gloves
sweet digits
adhesives
bound for dispatch
and so cling
to the tiered ensemble
stupendous enrichment
during the spell and
start, start.
for Stacy
UNTITLED (PORTRAIT)
Up here in the ancient gold trim the news not yet visual
so that he or she or we are invisible to the naked eye
whereas the gold trim on her gown is etched
falling down along and over to the hem
like an evening sky.
Or like nothing yet announced
so the missing and the present are singular in their dress
Under the Sign Page 1