Read Online Or to Begin Again by Ann Lauterbach - Free Book Online Page B

window, a sad-eyed doll
caused one to point as at a final moon, an
instrument long surpassed: thought-ghost reads the fi
the fa, child invents, sighs, scribbles
outside the faint stance of the ready-mades.
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    How much is that? One or two themes
slink away, scented in derision and
the decision not to play.
Tendresse mystery genre whose fast horses
and arcadian themes
question the robed dawn. Hehe hehe
as careful as a ladder leaning on air, nonsense chapters
drawn onto the figural ground.
She swallows the poison, waits and counts. Psyche’s
pool of omission reflects the flying horse as the villain leaves
his semen card in her body of reams (operatic ring of gold).
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    She draws the Empress from the
deck, its familiar headdress of snakes, one for each
known dead. Nobody’s diary, somebody’s curse.
From his niche in the anthology the Hero speaks,
eyeing her bloody or painted toes, her livid mouth.
Strip the prayer from the kiss web,
it is merely sham. Salvation has undone
her eternal soul into little itinerant drops,
each younger than dew.
The moon’s strap slips off the shoulder of night.
Night of Nights it is called; all must follow.
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    In memory of Barbara Guest

ELEGY FOR SOL LEWITT
    The weather map today is pale. The lines on the map
are like the casts of fishing lines
looping and curved briefly across air.
The sky now, also, toward evening, is pale.
On Sunday, in Beacon, there were lines
drawn on walls and also lines
drawn across the canvases of the last paintings
of Agnes Martin. One of them has two pale squares
on a blackened field.
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    The lines on your walls
    follow directions
as if
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    as if there were a kind of logic
charged with motion
at the end of winter: the pale blue northern cold
almost merged with the pale green
at Hartford, and then the blank newsprint of the sea.

Or TO BEGIN AGAIN
1.
    Way over in the particularities of evening
so many missing it seems we are alone at
last, you and whatever I am thinking about you,
not a happy thought, but not indifferent.
And that other world? The image
had receded under the angry claims of the
image, and in this redundancy
we stopped to buy apples, and to speak of the dead.
The face of the dead came into view
as a consolation, and the apples seemed
a magnitude of form, brightly gathered, a crowd.
These are impossible things to say clearly, because
the proper name has less than accurate
attributes: so little had been copied from life.
But think now of Seurat. Think of Child in White
rendered as absent agitations of a crayon. The end.
2.
    Or to begin again
gold touches the back of her neck. It spawns
a crest, a brief tattoo. She moves
into and beyond
shedding its improvisation, its effect.
The effect of gold is bright heat. She
seeks cover in a passing cloud, a passing leaf. Gold
moves off into the landscape, touching a wasp, a truck,
a stone. Down at the end of the path, a head
appears as that of a man, riveted to a wall.
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    The gold moves off and vanishes
as night ignites a halo
around the head at the end of the passage.
This is the assemblage of nevertheless ,
its sudden rupture. I thought of something else.
I thought of a stranger seated in a tent. The end.
3.
    Or to begin again
I had wanted a location but had become embattled
in a zone of supposition and indirection.
The emergency is ink-stained.
A temporary orange blocks the view.
An ambulance is climbing slowly uphill.
Returning to the lost, the sound increased
over whatever exemption had been founded on passage.
Around and around they went, the metallic children,
carving an arena into the climate, an
erasure that would become a road, repeating the turn,
learning its rhythm in the denuded wood.
He began, “I sought, this time, to approach him.”
I thought then of the witness, of the carriage of the
body moving downstream on a barge, and the small
red tug like a living toy, riveted to its mass. The end.
4.
    Or to begin again
in the