Hum
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
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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
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
Stones (The Coast of Turkey; Robert Smithson)
About the Darkness of the Self, Awkward (Giotto)
Detail 858-6 (Gerhard Richter)
Triangles and Squares (Guston, Malëvich)
Bookmark, Horizon (Emily Dickinson, Joseph Cornell)
One
AFTER MAHLER
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.
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.
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
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.