Rae Armantrout
EXPRESSION
Give me your spurt
of verbs,
your welter
of pronouns
desiring to be spread.
Bulge-eyed, clear-
bodied brine shrimp
bobbing to the surface.
I prefer
the hermit, trundling off
in someone else’s
exoskeleton—
but we all
come down,
to self-love,
self-love which,
like a virus,
has no love
and has no self
Diane Williams
CUTTING AND DRESSING
The doctor said, “Then you have a wonderful night.”
The term wonderful night is used to refer to the inner sanctum that has sex feeling in it.
There is a widespread misconception about the look, feel, and texture of a doctor’s waiting room. The doctor asked me did I want to give him my co-pay now.
For the handover, I wore toreador pants and bone leather shoes with little heels—backless and strapless. I did not bend my knees, but instead stiff-walked to my sitdown in a chair. My feet I kept up parallel to the floor and I crossed my legs at the ankles. Back at home for a cold lunch in my house with a red-tile roof, I sat in my own chair for sitting stiffly.
People are lovely things. People must have seen that my hair was in flat knuckled curls and really inconsiderately arranged. My walls are papered with a moiré pattern. My floor is covered by split brick pavers. I’ve got a tea cart set out with plastic cups, lime green drink, and a plate of dry baked products.
My tot Silvanus—with bad habits and suddenly—we had set the boy free!—pulled himself up onto our lyre-back side chair. Completely frenzied, the chair fell—and, because this child has never been significantly maltreated, he was stunned by the fall and he’s dead.
Brenda Hillman
DOPPLER EFFECT IN DIAGRAM THREE
Waves past the meadow viajante
Summer is almost straight
From cities from countries
They had straight-smelling shirts
Parentheses from the hawk a day sound
Only borders in the mouth
Almost no weather at all from its travels
The heat singinginging
A series of syllables not yet delivered
Families just beginning to gather
Double gather like curtains
So much not enough one said
A hope inflected from the east
Something at rest about the waves not then
Someone swell to be remembered
In the theories of the address
Blue & the palindrome of a wave
Moving against the rest
The earth’s axis has been set aflame
The harlequin picks his teeth with a matchstick
It was called life those decades
Dragonflies attached one per stalk
A music staff turned sideways
Papermill Creek before the death of paper
Incandescence is its own defense one said
Periodicity of a fear moving
Off from the too bright years
A bike in a car the spokes turning
Click-click past rags and ravens
It’s up to sounds to descend in sizes
To address a surprise or terror
But how does the air feel with all
Those waves inside do radio waves feel
When we’re listening to them
Can any object pass through the falling
And how does the ( ( ( ( ( ( ( (( do it
In the model an observer stands on
The platform and we grow to love him
He is wild and is thinking of nothing
Let us call all this observer A
There is a row of bending sounds
As the trouble curves rightward
Mr. Doppler is in heaven by now
A slim hush the fat springs click
The men in burgundy shorts roll
The little carts along
People think they are you but they are not
You are you and no one and everything
The oscillating quality of dusk clashes with
What is universal just as the sounds
In a person’s name clash with handwriting
How lovely we seem as someone pulls away
With an identity among the abstracted
Pale diners who eat behind the cellophane
But in fact he is lost to us
As the page turner at the recital is lost
Or one who speaks of the Irish solution
Or one who names roses Peace or Sally
When it starts being unbearable
Time will not pierce the air with its death feet
In the pulling away life is continuous
The worry hyphens inside the molecule
The sentence or the train passing
As it holds out its skirts of sound
The sentence has started its journey
But has no idea for its mystic demise
It rides in the firebox to the cave
Looking out at pines their raw huts
Bearing its constant falling
Over the laughter in the night pool of those
Who haven’t stopped and may not ever
Colin Channer
UNCONSOLED
In some language somewhere there has to be
A word that means melancholicallybewildered
An anfractuous set of glottals, slipping vowels
Like a counterwailing helix of wet stone stairs. Somewhere the
Carping of a tool against a whetstone,
A held note that trails to hush, and a wether ram
Tied to a stump marks time, padding,
Hooves morsing out a stutter. Feast eve. This may be
The genesis in every language—
Some sentience suspended in desire for the known
And knowable comfort of violence willed against it,
This wrath a sure hurt planned for, looked to,
The elision from this, this, wanting, to flight or free fall
Nothing but a blurred uncertain
Versus slaughter in the solid hitch to post.
The first scat I know of shot in Genesis, a bleat-letting
In Eden and what an erasure, no mention
Of the animal, only that the maker slew,
Drew blade cross cello tendons
And involuted gasping curdled, flesh made shit and notes.
So much on my conscience, Chet on the Grundig,
Davis on my mind, the distance
In imperial measure to New York
From East St. Louis lesser but more long
Than those kilometers to Paris, town of gray stone
Where a lover called his voice le sable;
Queased him till he saw it meant sand.
Seams beveled, Davis cotches in that slack
Unarmy posture on the dream-lit auction stage,
Couples in the smokedark murking,
Red glows with wispings—haint eyes.
Second set and Rob Roy loose, he wills that small hall bigger,
Fashions for his comfort first a cable then a mic.
Fear in four chambers, he’s stasis; acoustic he hovers
Leans backward held by history in the interstice
Of fall and flight, melancholicallybewildered,
Sentient but abstracted from the world,
In and over his own parable,
Shudder in his gut; the notes come in pellets
Stacatting, stutter-staggering, man god and goat,
His own twisting entrails too wet to think of as
Sure rope. In some language somewhere,
There has to be a word that means
Melancholicallybewildered. Sure.
Kathryn Davis
THE BOTANIST’S HOUSE
Mostly, she needed to put it all behind her, and by “all” she meant all of us, as well as the events of her life, what people call memories. The moment we were out of sight she opened the door to the tall house with the steep roof and went in. Right away it was as if she had never been inside a house before; even the noise the door made closing behind her seemed not to have been made by wood sliding against wood with an accompanying burst of air, but instead signaled the presence nearby of something previously unknown or imagined, something large and shifting around in a space too small for it, breathing heavily through the mouth.
Little bug, little scrub, little bead, little need. The Botanist knew she was being summoned. She was floating again, that much was for sure, her eyes like burnt holes in something not like a blanket but more like herself and consequently a lot worse to look at.
Up a long staircase and onto a landing. The windows were shut tight yet if she looked back she could see smoke seeping from the crevices, as well as from hundreds of small objects on shelves along the walls, unrecognizable, glinting as if in the light of a fire but there was no fire, no stove, no candle, no light at all. Meanwhile the smell of smoke occurred to her like the image of a little girl in a smocked dress playing jacks, not a memory but an idea. It was exactly the way she worked when she was botanizing: there would be the smell of hyacinth and there would be an old lady reaching for something just out of reach. There would be the taste of a cranberry bean and there would be a young man sharpening a pencil. You couldn’t interrupt these operations of reaching, of sharpening—they were each, in their own way, eternal.
The thing is, we couldn’t save one another. The Botanist was in danger but there was nothing we could do. Ditto the Archivist, borne on the increasingly powerful current, headed for the rapids where the Rock that Cries had ended many a life. We hadn’t heard about this yet but we were going to. There was nothing we could do. Once you were in the Savage Domain there was no escaping the Beast. Meanwhile we sat on our cloaks under the capacious beech tree, eating meat and drinking wine and planning what to do next, as if the operation we were involved in, however it might be described—Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, maybe, or fiddling while Rome burns—was not, likewise, eternal. As if we could have any say about the outcome. As if we couldn’t see the little brown dog curled on the grass at our feet.
The Botanist floated along the second-floor hallway and up the final flight of stairs to the third floor. Was it true, what they said? Once you went up you never came down? Little bug, little bud, little hug, little judge, little mug, little rug, little BUD. LITTLE BUD! On and on she drifted along the hallway, her obedience ferrying her past many doors, all of them closed tight, all of them with smoke seeping through the cracks. It is true that smoke is often used to create a barrier of aromatic vapor through which the air that carries sickness is unable to penetrate. Get out quickly, go a long way away, and don’t be in a hurry to come back: that was what the doctors were prescribing—the ones who hadn’t run away themselves, that is.
The family who used to live here had been beset by X. cheopis or rat fleas, pests known to be happiest (if pests can be said to be happy) during unseasonably mild, damp winters, which this one certainly seemed to have been. The family consisted of a mother and father and a boy, but when the boy got sick from sleeping in the bedclothes his father acquired in trade for a rooster, they left him behind. They left him behind for dead—that was the spirit of the age. The Silk Road ran in front of their house; everyone was using it, for commerce or as a means of escape. Some travelers relied on word of mouth, some on cairns or blazes. What everyone had in common was lack of destination.
The boy wasn’t dead, though. When he awakened, the place he was in was as dark as the deepest well. There seemed to be a log fire burning in the middle of the floor—though how could that have been? He was still inside his house, wasn’t he? Inside the house where he’d been born and suckled and weaned? The bedclothes too seemed to be arranging themselves without assistance. The trader had stuffed them with rat flea–infested feathers and hair; as the boy watched, the stuffing reassembled itself into a large creature that glistened like a pearl.
“Come to me,” the creature said, but it wasn’t talking to him.
The sun went down and for just one moment the sky was bathed in golden light. Then the Botanist opened the door and came floating across the threshold.
Inside she saw the boy sitting by the window, though he wasn’t exactly a boy. The person sitting by the window was older than he’d looked from below, older and bigger, and because he had wrapped himself in his cloak she couldn’t see the swellings on his body, but she could smell the sickness on him. What the Botanist saw, smelling it, was the Fairy beckoning the Prince to join her in the Garden of Paradise, even though she’d told him it was the one thing he was forbidden to do. The Fairy said if he joined her there and kissed her, Paradise would sink deep into the earth, which is where it was located in the first place.
In assembly, if you so much as thought of talking to your neighbor while the principal was telling the story of the Garden of Paradise, you would be turned to stone. The Prince drew back the branches and saw tears welling in the Botanist’s eyelashes. “I have not sinned yet,” he insisted. Even if everlasting night were to descend on him like the lid of his own casket, a moment like this would be worth it. He kissed the tears away from the Botanist’s eyes and then he kissed her lips, whereupon there came a sound like thunder, louder and more dreadful than any sound any living thing on earth had ever heard before. The chill of death crept over his limbs. The cold rain fell on his face, and the sharp wind blew around his head.
Down by the river we all heard it.
The man behind the concession stand doused the fire while a child in a faded green pinafore began closing up shop. Both of them looked around nervously, as if they were being followed. In the Keeper’s kitchen, the cake, which she had recently put into the oven, fell, but it took her a while to realize this, since the oven door was closed and it was an old oven, without a light. The cake was a One-Two-Three-Four Cake, the kind she used to make us for our birthdays, until she made one with a spoiled egg in it for Mother.
What lightning bolt devoured everyone? What earthquake? There had been a crowd of us but now we were almost one.
In the river the Archivist felt raindrops hit the side of his face each time he turned his head to breathe; at length he stopped turning his head, no longer feeling the need to do so. The Poet used to make fun of how afraid he was of everything but she never understood what a good swimmer he was; at Saint Roch he had been captain of the swimming team.
Now, in the water, he was naked, the wound on his leg completely healed, his flutter kick more muscular than ever.
The river charged over rocks and around fallen logs; it surged and eddied and funneled; it leapt into the air and then dropped a great distance in a waterfall, spangled and unfettered, foaming and loud into a moss-lined pool. The Archivist’s eyes were wet and he could see perfectly without his spectacles. Or, more accurately, he could see perfectly except for a spot in the middle that was nothing. Of course that’s where she was, in that spot, monitoring his arrival. That’s where she always was and always had been, in the spot he couldn’t see. It was what drove the Poet mad, finally.
The thing is, he wasn’t himself or what he thought of as himself, just as the farther we walked along the trail, the less we knew of what we thought of as ourselves. It was disconcerting, our titles having been so deeply imprinted in us as to become identities. The Cook hadn’t cooked anything in a long time; the Iceman had abandoned his quest for permafrost. If the Archivist was going to turn into something like a fish, no one was going to find it strange. It was all right, as long as he eluded the lure.
Meanwhile the beech tree provided us with protection from whatever was falling from the sky; beech trees allow very little light or much of anything else to reach the ground, appropriating it all for themselves. The tree was being imperial but we didn’t know that, its imperial behavior limited to trees and not people. In this way we could be certain that we were people and not plant life, though as was the case with the Archivist, it wasn’t always possible to register a transformation as it happened. Some of us were putting forth branches we couldn’t see called fear branches, like a tree whose space is being commandeered by a beech.
If the Botanist were here she could have explained what was going on. But that was how she’d always been, drifting away in pursuit of something better than anything we could offer, a keg party or a rare mushroom, a doomed boyfriend or a clump of lady’s slippers. Besides, we never paid attention to scientific explanation—none of us did, aside from the person providing it. The Astronomer walked up from the riverbank with an armload of fish, their tall dorsal fins shedding water like stars. The fish constellation isn’t very bright, he told us; it’s hard to see with the naked eye. As might be expected, we weren’t interested. The Astronomer said we should use what was left of the concessionaire’s fire to roast the fish if that infernal child would let us, and this was a side of him we hadn’t been aware of—a side of him that, unlike the scientific information he was quick to dispense, actually caught our interest.
The Cook was sound asleep on his back, grinding his teeth.
We don’t have that much time, someone said.
Our sense of urgency was strong, even though we didn’t know where we had to be, or when we had to be there.
In the third-floor bedroom in the tall, narrow house, the Botanist was lifting the person from the floor and putting him into bed. He weighed almost nothing. He was as light as a feather, almost as if he was already dead and gone and what she was lifting wasn’t his body but his soul. He looked at her beseechingly and she shook her head No. Brushing the hair back from the forehead, drawing the eyelids down over the eyeballs. They don’t know my story, she was thinking, so they can’t put their fingers into it and ruin it the way they’ve done to all the other stories. Except for the Cook, whose story was the shortest—as he had reminded us repeatedly—everyone had already told their tale.
Now she would suck the air from the sac. Extract the lights on their string of silk. The Silk Trail was far shorter than the Silk Road but the distance it covered was far greater, the compass of a human life.
Nathaniel Mackey
THIRD ÉTUDE ENDING “SOON COME” REBEGUN
—“mu” two hundred ninth part—
We were a search party the next time out. We
scouted retribution and remunerative states
we would all pass thru, try though we might to
rise
above. Sprung similitude put us on parallel
tracks. Allegory might’ve been its name but
it wasn’t. To make it mean something was our
aim.
To make it mean was to make it more real,
more than real, real abound itself... We came
to a moonlit stretch, dry scrub underfoot, those
more than real, real abound itself... We came
to a moonlit stretch, dry scrub underfoot, those
known
as the flown ones down for the night. They lay
dreaming about the bodies of the proper ones, a new
notion come into their heads, a new recognition
dreaming about the bodies of the proper ones, a new
notion come into their heads, a new recognition
while
they slept, spawn of a tribe yet to come. We lay
the same, we saw, parallel and spied upon, people
of the pulse, the broken song’s high cry, seeds, it
the same, we saw, parallel and spied upon, people
of the pulse, the broken song’s high cry, seeds, it
ap-
peared, eaten by sparrows... Blown away by
wind if not washed away by water, sprung recon-
naissance ran its course, new reconnoiter. We
were back to where we camped in no time, psychic
wind if not washed away by water, sprung recon-
naissance ran its course, new reconnoiter. We
were back to where we camped in no time, psychic
flight
alone what carried us it occurred to us, a thought we
took back, disproven by the bramble and the burrs
on our socks... Threads of light came down, gowns
took back, disproven by the bramble and the burrs
on our socks... Threads of light came down, gowns
of
light. The moon drew beauty from reticence, bloodfrom its pale presentation. Another sonic sphere
cried out. The wonder of thread was we were naked
un-
derneath, Hofriyati, wonder yet to be gotten over...We feasted ahead of time on condolences, moot solace
to
come, sooncome
•
Words came from forty-some years before, words
not given then given now. We camped on a slope,
the slightest incline ever, womanly amplitude an
image
of the earth we fell asleep dreaming, a meadow
above a meadow above a lake. It lay inland from
Lone Coast we knew, north of Lone Coast, the
reach of the world as clean as ice or an edge of chill
above a meadow above a lake. It lay inland from
Lone Coast we knew, north of Lone Coast, the
reach of the world as clean as ice or an edge of chill
as
cold as crystal, edge to be taken off, drape or em-
brace... A gangly symmetry bound it together, the
it of it remanding the was of it, Lone Coast, Crater
brace... A gangly symmetry bound it together, the
it of it remanding the was of it, Lone Coast, Crater
Lake,
names not given now given. It all hung together
in an offhand way we were thinking, happy to’ve
come to see it so, happy to see anything at all we
in an offhand way we were thinking, happy to’ve
come to see it so, happy to see anything at all we
lay
so blinded. It was a state we had no name for, felic-
ity’s romp and ranging forth an astute glue, backs
given the contours of the ground we lay against... We
ity’s romp and ranging forth an astute glue, backs
given the contours of the ground we lay against... We
were
the flown ones, we’d have been plucked featherless,
drape against undress the galactic war the proper ones
fought, our dreams of their bodies the planets. Comets.
drape against undress the galactic war the proper ones
fought, our dreams of their bodies the planets. Comets.
Mag-
netic
light
___________________
We had pitched our tents, not so much pitched as
popped. We thought ourselves blessed to be there
feeling it, whatever the feeling might be, deliberate
light
___________________
We had pitched our tents, not so much pitched as
popped. We thought ourselves blessed to be there
feeling it, whatever the feeling might be, deliberate
ex-
penditures of breath, long breathers between...
We were in a mood for study. We lived inside skin
looking out pores wide as windows. Not since
We were in a mood for study. We lived inside skin
looking out pores wide as windows. Not since
Ita-
mar and Sophia studied each other had blood run
so hot, not since we all first paired off, sat face to
face, legs open, erogenies abroad in the gap, yogic
so hot, not since we all first paired off, sat face to
face, legs open, erogenies abroad in the gap, yogic
stet...
The moon drew blood thru induction, pear-squat
inertia, whatever motor there was... We went farming
inertia, whatever motor there was... We went farming
our
heads all
night
night
•
Fabric vs. fold was the inequation we were now
being taught. The night sky had a matte, muted look.
Crater Lake lay so clear we saw to the bottom, no
water
was in it. We were learning how the past bled
into the present, the present bled into the past, team-
taught by stars, bramble, brush. Deep study some
said. I was one of them. Breathing in to breathe back
into the present, the present bled into the past, team-
taught by stars, bramble, brush. Deep study some
said. I was one of them. Breathing in to breathe back
out,
landing elsewhere, the lip of a canyon water cut a-
cross the world. Ours or another, abided with or
abetted by, deep study breathing out to breathe back
cross the world. Ours or another, abided with or
abetted by, deep study breathing out to breathe back
in...
Reentry we were called, we kept landing elsewhere.
Nocturnal tillage, we the nightly farmers, heaven-
ly rubes. We were kissing the world goodbye, a throwa-
way clime, high-crime climate, we the galactic eldren.
Nocturnal tillage, we the nightly farmers, heaven-
ly rubes. We were kissing the world goodbye, a throwa-
way clime, high-crime climate, we the galactic eldren.
We
slept deep enough needing to pee was no problem, wet-
ting ourselves as we slept. Wet fold, wet fabric, the
turning to what was at hand, what lay dependent, that
ting ourselves as we slept. Wet fold, wet fabric, the
turning to what was at hand, what lay dependent, that
of
which much had been said, whiling away eternity,
fingertipped eternity’s end... Night’s late whatsay, vale-
dictory we could see, lamenting what would be done
to the world. We were stumbling but still above ground,
fingertipped eternity’s end... Night’s late whatsay, vale-
dictory we could see, lamenting what would be done
to the world. We were stumbling but still above ground,
the
Field of Reeds messed up. We were singing the death
of the earth, deep study, getting ready to be gone. We
were conflating the two, caroling dearth, some common
of the earth, deep study, getting ready to be gone. We
were conflating the two, caroling dearth, some common
con-
ceit we broke
down to
___________________
Our campfire blown on by wind bore witness, the
wood of the world red, yellow, orange, lit up.
An iron grate we fell thru burning bore in as well,
down to
___________________
Our campfire blown on by wind bore witness, the
wood of the world red, yellow, orange, lit up.
An iron grate we fell thru burning bore in as well,
we
the white ash we studied, woebegone but to know
what soul was... An Armenian wind blew thru my
femur, Eskenian on the box my head had become. I
what soul was... An Armenian wind blew thru my
femur, Eskenian on the box my head had become. I
stared
into the fire, my aunt looking down to see both her
legs gone. A lifted ember sparked, spoke, the wood
of the world ascending, all the shrill wind’s insistence,
legs gone. A lifted ember sparked, spoke, the wood
of the world ascending, all the shrill wind’s insistence,
mere
sometimey
wind
wind