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Overview
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780819575210 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
Publication date: | 09/09/2014 |
Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
Edition description: | Reprint |
Pages: | 120 |
Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
just saying
Wesleyan Poetry
By RAE ARMANTROUT
Wesleyan University Press
Copyright © 2013 Rae ArmantroutAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8195-7300-1
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
SCRIPTURE
Your violins pursue
the downhill course
of streams,
even to their wild
curls and cowlicks.
To repeat
is not to catch.
* * *
Consider the hummingbirds,
how they're gussied up
and monomaniacal
as the worst (or best)
of you.
Consider the bright,
streamlined emergency
they manifest.
* * *
My leaves form bells,
topknots,
small cups of sex,
overweening, unstoppered.
Not one of you
with all your practice
is so extravagantly
coiffed.
INSTEAD
1
To each his own
severance package.
The Inca
hacked large stones
into the shapes of
nearby peaks.
2
The eerie thing
is that ghosts don't exist.
Rows
of clear droplets
hang from stripped twigs
instead.
3
Pain brings attention
to herself.
Spine on Fire!
Trail Blazer!
(Thinks she's hot.)
Out here
slim trunks bend
every which
OLD SCHOOL
Pull strings taut and
something like
points reappear
in the model.
Take place. Momentum
is conserved. Carry
elementary clone world
punctuation. Hostile
fetus. Cancer
is old school.
Impersonal. Carry
imperial aspirations.
To aspirate
is to breathe in
and choke. Nobody
wants this.
"Nobody did this
to me," screams
now blind Cyclops.
Nobody's listening
is conserved.
DRESS UP
To be "dressed"
is to emit
"virtual particles."
* * *
The spirit of "renormalization" is that
an electron
all by itself
can have infinite
mass and charge,
but, when it's "dressed" ...
* * *
A toddler stares at us
till we look up.
"Flirtatious," we call it.
She waits
until we get the joke
about being here,
being there.
ACCOUNTS
for Brian Keating
Light was on its way
from nothing
to nowhere.
Light was all business
Light was full speed
when it got interrupted.
Interrupted by what?
When it got tangled up
and broke
into opposite
broke into brand-new things.
What kinds of things?
Drinking Cup
"Thinking of you!
Convenience Valet"
How could speed take shape?
* * *
Hush!
Do you want me to start over?
* * *
The fading laser pulse
Information describing the fading laser pulse
is stored
is encoded
in the spin states
of atoms.
God
is balancing his checkbook
God is encrypting his account.
This is taking forever!
EVENT HORIZON
A street person? –
unshaven, haggard –
in a button-down
and a full black skirt.
If an image could talk,
what would it say?
A man in a skirt participates.
A man in a skirt
is never alone?
* * *
We are never alone.
We are men in skirts.
I am.
I draw attention
to myself.
To make a black hole,
one must concentrate.
COLD
What does it take
to stay warm?
Fire in a cage,
gnawing on wood,
throwing sprite
after sprite
off
to extinction.
Each baby's soul
is cute
in the same way.
Rapt attention
on a stalk,
surprised by thirst.
JUST SAYING
What might be said
to disport itself
along the cinderblock
in leaves.
* * *
What I write
I write instead
of ivy.
* * *
Green snouts
in evidence or –
more
to the point –
insolent
and tense.
* * *
What might be said
to writhe
professionally as the days
nod and wink.
GHOSTED
1
Long, loose,
spindly, green
stalks with their few
leaves, bug-eaten
tatters
on which
a black monarch
sits, folding
and unfolding
its wings.
2
A friend's funeral has broken up –
or was that the last dream?
Now I'm struggling
between monuments,
looking for Chuck.
It's getting dark
and I'm pissed off
because he won't answer his cell.
3
On the wall in a coffee bar,
a model's arms
and stern, pretty face
frame a window
(where her chest should be)
and a clear sky beyond
REMAINDER
String of empty offices,
illuminated, festive?
* * *
People exist
to attach importance.
* * *
I practice
high speed deselection.
* * *
The difference
between nothing
and nothingness
is existence.
* * *
My dead friends
don't visit me;
they say I didn't
know them.
* * *
You are cautious
indolent, stubborn,
skeptical, gentle, tense.
* * *
At sunset, pigeons
practice synchronized flying.
* * *
Thus "are" becomes "is,"
"is" becomes "ness."
* * *
Let the burning spill
extend
SUGGESTION
Your brain feels swollen,
as if it's floating
on a string, no, on two,
each held in the balled fist
of an eye.
The feeling produces this image:
two crying children –
brother and sister? –
clutching strings
in an old city of brick, stone.
What does this image explain?
* * *
"In the beginning"
In the end,
these are –
there are –
only suggestions:
"Clockwise" or "counter" –
though there are no clocks.
"Horizontal" or "vertical" –
though there is no horizon.
* * *
Being aware of anything outside yourself
means you aren't sleeping
so you have pushed things away.
Now you are alone with pain.
Pain is as large as you are
and is not obedient.
If you became pain, perhaps,
then you could rest.
But it is not possible
to merge with pain.
SPENT
Suffer as in allow.
List as in want.
Listless as in transcending
desire, or not rising
to greet it.
To list
is to lean,
dangerously,
to one side.
Have you forgotten?
Spent
as in exhausted.
MY TASTE
What it means
to "own sake."
* * *
How to explain
my taste
for phone lines,
the shared slouch
of those two
or this one
like a ruler
where a hummingbird
marks the center
slash.
* * *
This yard which
for years
was a blond patch
and is now
a stylish desert,
bronze crushed granite
between bushes
flowering furiously
HAUNTS
1
Rock eaten
to familiar shapes –
heads cocked
on jagged spines.
* * *
How many
orange, pink, white
rock pinnacles
are visible from here?
Grandeur
is that number
plus distance,
as if "again"
could be made manifest.
2
"Nature" was a 19th-century fad,
cousin to eugenics.
In the 21st century,
America's soft core's
undead.
* * *
On how many bookstore shelves,
lovely, fanged teenagers,
red-eyed, smeared with blood.
PARTING SHOTS
1
Long, confident sentences
of the early visitors,
so unlike ours,
so much like one another,
remark
on the sculpted "grandeur"
of the walls,
and then, with one light touch,
on the bracing sense
of insignificance
that they impart.
2
Behind the only wall in sight,
the defamiliarized wall,
a sniper
tells a camera crew
his work is "invigorating"
because it's "personal."
INFLECTION
When I wake up, I'm dragging
lower incisors
along those above,
and, for an instant,
I experience
satisfaction and fear
in equal parts.
* * *
I'm reading, "The wrath of God
inflicts dragons,
ostriches,
and owls,
seductively singing."
Go on.
* * *
Babble:
horns punctuate
a flexible roar.
* * *
Some roofs have one
or more
water tanks
with pointed hats;
some roofs have none.
Some squares are black
and trimmed in silver;
some are gray.
THE LOOK
The boxer crab
attaches a sea anemone
to each claw,
waves.
* * *
You, small flower-bearing stick,
what is your true name?
* * *
Spooked and spooked again.
It's cute
when the intricately patterned
black and yellow fish
twitches
and shoots off
in a new direction.
* * *
From birth,
you've been moving
your eyes
back and forth,
looking
to be hailed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from just saying by RAE ARMANTROUT. Copyright © 2013 by Rae Armantrout. Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsScripture
Instead
Old School
Dress Up
Accounts
Event Horizon
Cold
Just Saying
Ghosted
Remainder
Suggestion
Spent
My Taste
Haunts
Parting Shots
Inflection
The Look
At Least
Holding Pen
Subdivision
My Apocalypse
Things
Entry
Arrivals
Circulating
Production
Being Seen
Transactions
At
Action Poem
The Thinning
Elements of Bank
Situation
Midst
Representative
Second Order
Scale
Custom
And
Treatment
Coming Out
Watch This
Experts
Experimental Design
Meeting Expectations
Problem Areas
Between Islands
Half Lives
Progress
The Music Teacher
Without End
Bardos
Living Space
Luster
Formal Constraints
Rounds
Mother's Day
Thus
Focus
The Elect
New Intelligence
Another
Still and All
Real Time
Meant
Hymn
Stop and Go