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CHAPTER 1
Versed
Results
1
Click here to vote on who's ripe for a makeover
or takeover
in this series pilot.
Votes are registered at the server and sent back
as results.
2
Click here to transform
oxidation into digestion.
From this point on,
it's a lattice of ends disguised as means:
the strangler fig,
the anteater.
3
I've developed the ability to revise what I'm waiting for
so that letter becomes dinner gradually
while the contrapuntal noddingof the Chinese elm leaves
redistributes ennui
Versed
The self-monitoring function of each cell
"writ large,"
personified —
a person.
* * * * * * * * *
The "Issues of the Day"
are mulled steadily by surrogates.
* * * * * * * * *
Metaphor forms a crust beneath which the crevasse of each experience.
* * *
Traversed by robotic surveyors.
* * *
Mother yells, "Good job!"
when he drops the stick,
"Good job!"
when he walks in her direction
Fetch
1
Was it a flaming mouse that burned Mares' house down or was it just the wind?
On Tuesday Mares and his nephew stood by the original version.
Is this plausible?
Fire Chief Chavez said Tuesday that he thought so.
2
Let's see
your itty-
bitten specificity fetish,
your mom's phantasmic what's-it held conspicuously under threat.
Day hoists its mesh of near approximations,
(its bright skein of pores.)
Eyes fetch thrown shadows
Address
The way my interest in their imaginary kiss
is secretly addressed to you.
* * *
Without intention
prongs of ivy mount the posts supporting the freeway.
It would be possible to say each leaf
circumscribes hope
or that each leaf,
fastidiously coming to one point,
suggests a fear of the unknown.
* * *
These glossy,
laced-up, high-heel boots
(each leaf)
addressed to you
Vehicles
Pairing matched fragments,
then pausing —
archly? —
Mozart creates a universe out of pleasantries.
"How is everything for you today?"
the hostess at the front desk asks.
* * *
If that (head-on car-crash)
had happened, we say,
all this would not have been —
like "having been"
were a lasting thing:
the small tree on the highway meridian
having been lit up for a moment now
by sun breaking through cloud
* * *
Look how we "attempted to express ourselves."
Every one of these words is wrong.
It wasn't us.
Or we made no real attempt.
Or there is no discernible difference between self and expression.
* * *
What was meant by "streamlining"
we might guess,
but what was meant by streamlining as value added to this
already bulky,
even bulbous,
baby-pink conveyance,
we can only ask
A Resemblance
As a word is mostly connotation,
matter is mostly aura?
Halo?
(The same loneliness that separates me
from what I call
"the world.")
* * *
Quiet, ragged skirt of dust
encircling a ceramic gourd.
* * *
Look-alikes.
"Are you happy now?"
* * *
Would I like a vicarious happiness?
Yes!
Though I suspect yours of being defective,
forced
Outer
Dolls as celebrities (Barbie);
celebrities as dolls.
I'm the one who can't know if the scraggly old woman putting a gallon of vodka in her shopping cart feels guilty, defiant, or even glamorous as she does so. She may imagine herself as an actress playing an alcoholic in a film.
Removal activates glamour?
To see yourself as if from the outside — though not as others see you.
Carried by light,
images remain
while sensation is so evanescent
as to be always beyond belief.
The outer world means State Farm Donuts Tae Kwando?
Thoughts as spent fuel rods.
Preceded and followed by statuesque shadows of cacti on a lawn.
Today could be described as a retired man humming tunelessly to himself.
When I ask what you're thinking, you say "about explaining to children the best way to build a Maypole."
Relations
"Head" and "Bring."
I remember the words.
"Bobble" and "Bauble,"
"Rosy" and "Lonely"
set off now.
What will you little chimes bring me?
Time flows because no set of proofs
can be complete.
Bring me the friendship
between solving and dissolving
Babel
"Let us go down and confuse their language
so we may distinguish the people from our thoughts."
* * *
Can it be true that the baby is afraid
his wish to gobble us up
has been realized already?
* * *
Hard to say since we've thrown our voice
into the future and the past
Operations
This child fights cancer with the help of her celebrity fan club,
says,
"Now I know how hard it is to be a movie star."
* * *
"Hey,
my avatar's not working!"
* * *
This small hawk on a wire above tangled flowers.
* * *
Speech, too, was thought to be inhabited by a god.
Then hunger invented light.
Help
Creased, globular,
shiny, baby
pumpkins on stalks upright in a vase.
Let amorphous
restlessness condense to objects like these
again.
* * *
A space
"inside"
can't bear to be un-
interrupted.
I mark it:
"I" "I" "I"
* * *
If this were a stutter of brittle reeds,
an evening glint fingering each
"at a time"
might help
Name Calling
Objects are silly.
Lonesome
as the word "Ow!"
is.
* * *
Could we grant them a quorum —
dense,
with the shiny glossolalia of the leaves,
the resilience of open-ended questions?
* * *
Bud-nipped.
What the pudendum attempts to pinch off,
tries repeatedly.
What comes to be called pleasure
Pleasure
A sleight-of-hand equilibrium
being produced as bees
pass one another,
a ticklish rumble shuttling between blooms.
I'd like to think I'm one,
no,
all of them.
* * *
This sense of my senses
being mine
is what passes life to life?
How distinguish one light from the next?
Only distinctions can
matter.
(Canned matter.)
* * *
Just made up of tuning fork ferns,
blackbird pipe-lettes:
little golden self-measuring extents
Guess
1
The jacaranda, for instance, is beautiful but not serious.
That much I can guess.
And that the view is softened by curtains.
That the present moment is an exception,
is the queen bee a hive serves,
or else an orphan.
2
So the jacaranda is foreign and extravagant.
It gestures in the distance.
Between there and here you ask
what game we should play next week.
So we'll be alive next week,
continuing what you may or may not
mean to be an impossible flirtation
Locality
1
"Is it nummy? Yeah, huh?"
2
Songs as empathy evacuation engines.
It's not that I wish to pledge slavish devotion as the singer seems to do;
it's not that I want to be the object of such attention —
but I'll listen to this song
again and again.
3
Where you put them —
did you, for instance,
those window bars reflected in sun glasses upside down between remotes?
4
Wires dip obligingly between blanched poles,
slightly askew.
Any statement I issue,
if particular enough,
will prove I was here
Wannabe
Impossibly teetering is one way to remain.
Half contemptuous, half ravished
by vampire wannabes maybe.
* * *
A two-lane highway between ghost-towns —
one of the cliches you love
the memory, not of events
but of continuity itself.
* * *
Who are you anyway?
Stretch
Lime green against dark foliage,
the Emerald Oil sign gleams alone.
Stars slingshot round the center at millions of miles per.
In rest home beds, patients hang on as if to love.
Moment to moment's stretched plausibility.
(Body beneath a wooden plank,
she's sucking her grandmother's cock.)
Left Behind
1
To reinvent anomalous figments.
Twisted and white, limbs strike poses.
One ballerina after another on point down the highway meridian —
eucalyptus
committed to attitudes just so
but still awash in their own equivocal leaf shadow.
I pass as if to pass were to think better of something.
2
Dreams unspool contexts
with an ersatz tongue-in-cheek
familiarity, conspicuously flimsy:
a singer intoning "Venice Boulevard"
on a store sound system late last night,
a crooner placing us perhaps among flight students —
reminiscing,
"when you're land-ing on Highway Fi-ive"
Amplification
Some think in the first days
Hunger and Lust arose separately and then paired up by chance
having only self-love in common —
and what is that?
Still, what a pair they've been!
* * *
Some think we can achieve escape velocity
if only we can make our thoughts bounce
harder and harder off the near walls —
the limits —
of what is known,
what is trite about these characters.
* * *
We have it on good authority
that we're dying to express this
one thousand times more or less precisely,
dying to practice
Bonding
On the television in an empty pharmacy,
the contestant whose guess is closest to retail squeals.
* * *
A want,
conceived as illusory
(rhetorical),
is said
to underlie the real,
underwrite matter.
* * *
A man tells a camera he prefers "lady-boys"
because they can't fake orgasm.
* * *
In the updraft,
the particulate glitz is beside itself.
* * *
Check-plus! I wait for my thought to reappear.
(I trust recognitions.)
* * *
Pathos of strangers' headlights tracing the curve at dusk
is inexplicable
Through
1
The intentions come previously.
Little apron leaves,
what are you covering up,
plump
and forgotten on a woody stalk?
Will itself,
unoccupied,
unowned
2
These dark tunnels into
and through the loving look.
Reaching both and neither
always makes me hot.
"Did you have fun playing with trains,
Phantom Stallion,
Rainbow Frog?"
Scumble
What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words such as "scumble," "pinky," or "extrapolate?"
What if I maneuvered conversation in the hope that others would pronounce these words?
Perhaps the excitement would come from the way the other person touched them lightly and carelessly with his tongue.
What if "of" were such a hot button?
"Scumble of bushes."
What if there were a hidden pleasure in calling one thing by another's name?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Versed"
by .
Copyright © 2009 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.
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