Or to Begin Again
Page 9
The girl enters knowledge.
You can see her on the trail
of the smallest bug, the most inglorious weed.
We join her in the aftermath of promise
where she is studying the tides.
World without image dilates. The end.
16.
Way over in the particularities of evening
gold touches the back of her neck. It spawns
in a zone of supposition and indirection.
Auden imagining war at a sidewalk café.
Origin marked by tracks in mud.
At whose approval? The call stuffed in a sock?
Begin but stay back in the infrastructure
nothing noticed, nothing gained
as it fears the dawn when the moon
recessed into the harbor of play:
the head of the beheaded despot
judgment against the living
the mirage of escape
stands still. Does not. Does. Go back
where she is studying the tides.
Go back to the beginning. The end.
In memory: Katherine Mester Luzzi
Ann Lauterbach was born and grew up in New York City. After college (University of Wisconsin, Madison), she attended Columbia University on a Wood-row 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. She is also a Visiting Core Critic in the Yale School of Art. 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 Germantown, New York.