Ann Lauterbach
Quadrille
1.
Spool of dark green thread rolls slowly backwards into a daisy field
not found unwinding downhill
most narrow path
term of the unmended
darker than grass
fabricated
pit of a plum
damp headless rabbit
tune-stripped air
some
murderous repeat
preselects
the abrasive
& now
all implication
swelters diaristically
O my small
Lord.
Please provide
an alabaster form of forgetting
to ruse the system.
Am ambient
am docile
among contractions
also I am
an integer of false claims
as if that drawing
were by my
own hand.
So speaketh away
from adulation
syntactical shape
now already
fortune’s knot.
How the machine
hates an anomaly,
Madam,
how it
abuses imperfection.
2.
Meanwhile
confidence swells
across the aperture of
singularity whose
mode is an infinite
starlight
invisible to the
naked eye
and to her own pleasure
dream swept
on a ladder climbing
toward the voice
you may have known
beloved
swimming in a pond
reflecting the constellated
grief of centuries
monks gathered
around the bier of Saint Francis
walls wet, sweating
where later a sacred fount
beckons the oldest awe
into its stainless steel basin
and in the night a girl
writes letters
in colored chalk
on the pavement stone.
Every force evolves a form.
And the petals of a rose
have fallen
into partial pinks
and collapsing browns
as if soiled or bruised
and the cicadas have gone back
into the underworld,
webbed wings strewn,
pin-prick eyes blind.
The dream has left me
bewildered. My neighbor’s dog
barked it open and out
I fell into the milky dawn,
into the practice of everyday life.
3.
Were we to return
the covers would open
and the sheets
introduce us to an indelible
sentence drawn from Spinoza
who speaks of a third kind of
knowledge, and my legs
would wrap around your body
in the poetics of space. This
would occur after the end
after the sense of sight
the apocalypse and after
all the things we lived
among. You would describe
the desert and the book
I would argue for
the will to believe, all this
before our morning coffee
set on a small table
in the field
not far from a stream
where a mockingbird
shapes time
above the threaded grass.
A spider has netted the air.
This comes in a kit. Seeds
also available; see below.
Blissed out on the sea’s
dragnet, war fires
extinguished
and so candles
lit for
the downed
many but
not all
accounted.
The arch
has collapsed,
singers departed.
Strings pull
at the flat
horizon
agitating the hour.
The salty
cauldron of the Nile
rubs into our wounds --- crusty
palimpsest of the profile frieze.
\
4.
To go out from the city, to find
a path and install it
onto the wall where the sun,
ever full, distributes
multiplicity.
Levity and chance.
Let them beget
new justice
into our dithering trials.
All along the edges
there are crude blue margins,
fists of brown leaves.
A luminous mask floats above, as
buoyant and empty as ever.
Ya, ya, says bird, leaving the yard.
Voice recedes into eternity’s
pale marker. A
video shows
replications of figures
crowded onto rectangles of
night accompanied
by a silent chorus of ravenous
beetles felling the trees.
Blind slippage in the unanchored field.
You porous into me, gladly.
That protein assemblage is taut
among least vibrations.
This inner song had best abate
lest all achieve stasis
around a melancholy pall, our
beings’ repeated
inferences, and the lyric joys
hinge inclusivity
onto the aesthetic dump
where our dream of
time’s lucidity
flips for breathable air
at all our thresholds:
tear-stained glass, door,
mouth, the ever-spiraling list
traced away from duration
to install the synoptic read.
Quadrille
1.
Spool of dark green thread rolls slowly backwards into a daisy field
not found unwinding downhill
most narrow path
term of the unmended
darker than grass
fabricated
pit of a plum
damp headless rabbit
tune-stripped air
some
murderous repeat
preselects
the abrasive
& now
all implication
swelters diaristically
O my small
Lord.
Please provide
an alabaster form of forgetting
to ruse the system.
Am ambient
am docile
among contractions
also I am
an integer of false claims
as if that drawing
were by my
own hand.
So speaketh away
from adulation
syntactical shape
now already
fortune’s knot.
How the machine
hates an anomaly,
Madam,
how it
abuses imperfection.
2.
Meanwhile
confidence swells
across the aperture of
singularity whose
mode is an infinite
starlight
invisible to the
naked eye
and to her own pleasure
dream swept
on a ladder climbing
toward the voice
you may have known
beloved
swimming in a pond
reflecting the constellated
grief of centuries
monks gathered
around the bier of Saint Francis
walls wet, sweating
where later a sacred fount
beckons the oldest awe
into its stainless steel basin
and in the night a girl
writes letters
in colored chalk
on the pavement stone.
Every force evolves a form.
And the petals of a rose
have fallen
into partial pinks
and collapsing browns
as if soiled or bruised
and the cicadas have gone back
into the underworld,
webbed wings strewn,
pin-prick eyes blind.
The dream has left me
bewildered. My neighbor’s dog
barked it open and out
I fell into the milky dawn,
into the practice of everyday life.
3.
Were we to return
the covers would open
and the sheets
introduce us to an indelible
sentence drawn from Spinoza
who speaks of a third kind of
knowledge, and my legs
would wrap around your body
in the poetics of space. This
would occur after the end
after the sense of sight
the apocalypse and after
all the things we lived
among. You would describe
the desert and the book
I would argue for
the will to believe, all this
before our morning coffee
set on a small table
in the field
not far from a stream
where a mockingbird
shapes time
above the threaded grass.
A spider has netted the air.
This comes in a kit. Seeds
also available; see below.
Blissed out on the sea’s
dragnet, war fires
extinguished
and so candles
lit for
the downed
many but
not all
accounted.
The arch
has collapsed,
singers departed.
Strings pull
at the flat
horizon
agitating the hour.
The salty
cauldron of the Nile
rubs into our wounds --- crusty
palimpsest of the profile frieze.
\
4.
To go out from the city, to find
a path and install it
onto the wall where the sun,
ever full, distributes
multiplicity.
Levity and chance.
Let them beget
new justice
into our dithering trials.
All along the edges
there are crude blue margins,
fists of brown leaves.
A luminous mask floats above, as
buoyant and empty as ever.
Ya, ya, says bird, leaving the yard.
Voice recedes into eternity’s
pale marker. A
video shows
replications of figures
crowded onto rectangles of
night accompanied
by a silent chorus of ravenous
beetles felling the trees.
Blind slippage in the unanchored field.
You porous into me, gladly.
That protein assemblage is taut
among least vibrations.
This inner song had best abate
lest all achieve stasis
around a melancholy pall, our
beings’ repeated
inferences, and the lyric joys
hinge inclusivity
onto the aesthetic dump
where our dream of
time’s lucidity
flips for breathable air
at all our thresholds:
tear-stained glass, door,
mouth, the ever-spiraling list
traced away from duration
to install the synoptic read.