Hum Read online

  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

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  A Penguin Random House Company

  Copyright © 2005 by Ann Lauterbach

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  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

  R/Endings

  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.

  EVENT HORIZON

  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