HUM
ALSO BY ANN LAUTERBACH
Also by Ann Lauterbach
If in Time: Selected Poems 1975–2000
On a Stair
And for Example
Clamor
Before Recollection
Many Times, But Then
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 Cove
(with Ellen Phelan)
How Things Bear Their Telling
(with Lucio Pozzi)
Greeks
(with Jan Groover and Bruce Boice)
Sacred Weather
(with Louisa Chase)
HUM
ANN LAUTERBACH
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Copyright © 2005 by Ann Lauterbach
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lauterbach, Ann, 1942–
Hum / Ann Lauterbach.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-66048-5
I. Title.
PS3562.A844H86 2005
811’.54—dc22 2004058740
Page xi constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
for Tom
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some of these poems appeared, often in earlier drafts, in the following journals; I thank their editors: Avec, The Bard Papers, Conjunctions, Court Green, Fence, Five Fingers Review, No: A Journal of the Arts; 26: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics.
“Bookmark, Horizon” first appeared in A Convergence of Birds, Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer (New York, Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2001). “Detail 858-6 (Gerhard Richter)” was published in Richter 858 Eight Abstract Pictures, edited by David Breskin (San Francisco, The Shifting Foundation, SF MOMA; distributed by D.A.P.). “After Mahler” was published in The Best American Poetry 2004, edited by Lyn Hejinian (New York, Scribners).
For the score to Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, used on the jacket, thanks to Karen Garthe.
Thanks also to my marvelous agent, Lourdes Lopez, and to my editor at Penguin, Paul Slovak, for his continued support of this work.
What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes
with no eyes. Look with thine ears.
—SHAKESPEARE, KING LEAR, IV. 6
If you listen with your ear, it is hard to understand.
If you hear with your eye, you are intimate at last.
—WU-MEN KUAN
CONTENTS
I. AFTER MAHLER
Tent
Luck
Etymology
Instruction
Event Horizon
Logistics
Untitled with Moon
Seen, Overheard
Fragment (August)
Harmony
Country Life
Oppen’s Way
Sign
After Mahler
Opera
II. IMPOSSIBLE BLUE
Stones (The Coast of Turkey; Robert Smithson)
Memento Mori (Berlin)
Impossible Blue
About the Darkness of the Self, Awkward (Giotto)
Detail 858-6 (Gerhard Richter)
Grid MTV
Triangles and Squares (Guston, Malëvich)
Prey (Botticelli)
Bookmark, Horizon (Emily Dickinson, Joseph Cornell)
III. HUM
To & So
Victory
Field
Twig
Fragment (September)
Hum
Elegy in August
Topos
Self-Portrait as I Am
God
M. and F. at the K.G.B.
Precision Tuning
XYZ Plus Minus
Postscript
One
AFTER MAHLER
TENT
Maybe it will fall away.
Maybe what is interesting will also be beautiful
although that is—
that is:
not to look out or at, but into.
Come closer, so close
what you see can be seen as hindsight.
The form seems too simple.
The form seems an error of judgment.
As if one had jumped across a boundary
to find the missing gift, left
in the brute junk of wandering gangs.
This is another way of speaking about intention,
about the theater of gathering.
LUCK
The day, you see? Huge, like Texas.
I saw a hawk today the birds froze.
Today I saw a hawk the small birds were still.
A hawk on a branch tail and shoulders
straight, a soldier is what I thought,
its small head moved in all directions
excellent robot I thought.
The small birds were still
as if without life
to escape the eye of the hawk.
The day, you see? Huge,
like Texas, or Bach,
Bach never still,
it is the nature of Bach not to stay still
to move in the orders of Bach
sometimes they seem limitless
as if out of the earth’s orbit
or to come to the limits of earth
and then to go on
up over down
so that day can no longer be seen.
The boys in the water froze.
The thing over Texas broke up.
ETYMOLOGY
You will have been glad
iconography sweetly daunted what is the ab
in abjection? Keith wondered.
We sought no rule. The piano was, after all, a man.
And she reached her slender arms into it, made it
slur its edges into sonic attenuation.
And the man rammed his throat onto his
long instrument, its
noise gathered and broke from.
At school, those who
had some notion of history
quoted it, as if it were a thing away,
others simply traversed its wake
into sampling and presence
as if the dead president
were finally of no account
other than his horse and carnage.
History failed to come forth, it spat back
trivia and made a form.
So these are the famous shoes
and this the painted mountain
and these are the vernacular ghosts
strutting their tunes into the storm,
its violent indifference.
The catbird walked along the grass
and took bugs back to the nest.
She seemed almost friendly in her indifference.
But the subject, its identity, proclaimed
nothing so much as similarity, a field
halted at proof, undermining fact,
its cruel accomplishment.
Something thrown, but where? Down, under,
into the suffering? As in abduct, abuse.
to Keith Sanborn
INSTRUCTION
To maximize the dim effects of dream
declaw the cat. Also,
name the mother in the dream, that one, spilling
on the first violinist in the quartet who sways in a crimson
gown. Or that one, sad on her cot
with only one eye, blinking at the wreath
hung on the wall where the fire was.
That is not a dream. Get rid of it.
To maximize the dim effects of dream
read Nabokov and listen to
rain. The woman with the long dark hair in the corner
was that the mother? The rich Christians in the west
speak in tongues. What do they say?
Are they speaking to God risen like a sun
over mountains? The mother was not there, so that also
is not the dream. Nabokov spoke in tongues, the hilarity of
his rue and rage teased from his mother’s as from the milk
of human kindness. Drink the apparition.
1.
Lost reckoning wing wing side by side
measures the fleet’s standard edition
atlas, bird, cup
one after another, so. The service policy
addressed all three, and credit
only the added attraction
unlisted except as an exclusive
so you needed cash in hand and a fast format
If nothing resonates in this plot, try again.
But in order to find what we feel
is right, if it is right, we will need to make
whose
justification
may be the actual feeling
after
day or night.
Might there also be a scheme, a
contest, something to cover errors, make good
from the dump, find the thing
under the other things, one
that cannot be seen from here. Sing, brothers:
Dre e e e am,
dream dream dream. Some
remain mute, wrapped
inside the hull
slow boat to ch ch ch agrees to trade invades s s s
these are intimate sounds
and pictures lost behind clouds.
Power of Disney and the Pink Floyd oggles animated s s s
graphic cats tinker toys inhabited archive
Afloat, pushed to shore,
a pink shoe, a blond doll, personal stuff.
You might find me cast in that direction
breathing with difficulty
wishing never to find myself at sea again.
2.
The jokey ephemera of the age makes me believe
the birds are thirsty, pecking the dry bath.
What sweeps over the country
its glass eye, so that we see
through, but not into, ordinary habits of daily life?
The horizon, bewitched by fog,
caused them to spin
and took him down looking straight out at the dark ocean on a
nearly moonless night get the wings level and find where
as if in the shell of an egg.
The endeavor hid its tracks
in dissipated wonder
and they landed where the rubble left off—
far from the crowd
gathered at water’s edge to watch the display.
Are you tired of all this happening?
The leaves appear to be tired; they have fallen to the ground.
Last night I counted
as they fell: one, two, three. The sky
this bright economy
is tired of blue, now it is orange
with black spots. All else
plus or minus the dials
is to be divided between theories of freedom
and theories of God
tries to find a universal language what is his spirit
small integer absolute music forces of cacophony the danger of Futurism
depicted as lovers
slowly copulating on the sea’s red and gold foam.
The best way to predict the future is to conceive it
diehard merrily disconnects the chip
draw near
see the red tug the ruined castle double your anticipation.
3.
Enter the hero.
He grows up poorer than poor.
He ends up in a math class.
Even he doesn’t believe it.
In six weeks
he would be more efficient.
He needed to create
a distraction.
He gets hooked up in Orlando.
It triggers expenditure, every big company,
you name it—
close the door the fake participation of the manual laborer crime
hidden in Bond’s site of production and human rights justice the Christian
and so on and so on
order
balanced order Buddha for example coincidence of opposites wisdom in
favor of the good a collective of outcasts beloved
liberation tissue of spontaneity
hypersprecht
O you who look for pastel transcendence
who do not believe
why imagine the white dot is a moon?
Why slay the infidel?
There is no span
all arguments blur
and lower life mildews along the riverbank
and a figure goes on a rampage in the exhausted
vocabulary of displacement
the arc of the bridge has collapsed
things remain under their masks
there is neither the one nor the other with whom
to flirt. This is what occurs, less than a horizon
tea leaves berserk in the global riverbed
Things drip.
4.
Another day’s scansion
secretly at work in the massive affiliation
could focus
on an opening: icons appear for each thing: atlas, bird, cup.
Look up at the shape of a rotunda
humped high above the shore.
I was at the periphery all this time
all during this time I was at the periphery
notes fell through the percussive zeal
even as rose petals were strewn on the loading dock
and the bride kissed the groom
under their parasol
the issue of kids the lily project
mechanics of turbulence in the spheres
and the bleak continuum of a repeated phrase sung across the alley.
Clandestine erasures fortify our trivia, so this sheen, this look,
floats over rhetoric, beckoning small retrievals
onto which we might paste yet another history
might as well.
LOGISTICS
What are we to know? Inward, old seagull, cut,
abrasive magic and its clues. List
comes from the nearly invisible to announce
but she, in her museum of rhymes, finds death
among her things: inward, old seagull, and the numbers
cut out and the letters cut out.
There was a gathering. It was like a story, but not.
It was like another room in which Satie
was underlined in red, whose correction is
sate. So she might have been sated, in her notes,
her musical likeness, her
resistance. They were affiliated. That would be one
sentence to know.
But it would be trouble
when life depended on it.
If life depends on it. Life depends on
it.
In noise, the mother said, cut it out!
wanting order and silence. But the mother was all
disorder and her nights were the noise of nights.
UNTITLED WITH MOON
What she sees are reinforcements from the dream
wherein the cat
comes out from under a flimsy wall
attached to its mother.
Better to lie down on the floor
and watch the canopy sway,
the logics of cloud tinker with light.
Tomorrow all stories will be abridged.
The old men will talk of creatures
bedazzled by dawn, the trick of dawn,
things unknown to anyone,
feuds and love confided by
uncle to girl when he feels the urge
to tell. Desire
will return, bounding or lancing down
from the scant universe, causing
burns and antennae,
blisters of air. The pilgrims will move on
into the funnel
cooled on the water by the moon’s breath.
There is only one way down to the river, at least from here.
SEEN, OVERHEARD
To stay among shifts
to fall out beyond tools of trade
beyond friendship’s replicas
her face turned
his face
among these
migrating references
telephoto lens and
offered spot
ideal before murder
ideal before the spoken
ideal before sport.
Yet the second galaxy is hazy to the naked eye
bird blue
to the eye up close near the ground
near change.
Equation drowns from the corner
of an odd sensation
without a singular and, without addendum
so that
to live among these
to establish a plural
to race out from advice a girl
spitting crumbs