Or to Begin Again Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  I.

  II.

  III.

  Also BY ANN LAUTERBACH

  Hum

  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)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published in Penguin Books 2009

  All rights reserved

  Page ix constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Lauterbach, Ann,———.

  Or to begin again / Ann Lauterbach.

  p. cm.—(Penguin poets)

  eISBN : 978-1-101-02920-6

  I. Title.

  PS3562.A844O7 2009

  811’.54—dc22 2008038414

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Copyright © Ann Lauterbach, 2009

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Constance Kaine and Thomas Neurath

  In memory of Nikos Stangos

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author would like to express her thanks to the editors of the journals in which some of these poems, often in earlier versions, first appeared: Atlanta Review, Bard Papers, Conjunctions, Dog Under Porch, GlitterPony, No: A Journal of the Arts, 6x6. An earlier version of “Nothing to Say” was published by Belladonna Books, #85.

  Also: continued gratitude and affection to Paul Slovak at Viking Penguin; and to Lourdes Lopez and Anna Moschkovatis for their generous guidance and help; and to my colleagues and students at Bard College, for providing a buoyant community of inquiry and response.

  A NOTE TO THE READER:

  When a proper name appears in parenthesis after a title, it often indicates that the poem has been drawn from an encounter; notations written as I walked through an exhibition, or listened to someone give a talk; or from my reading of an essay or poem. Throughout this collection, I am interested in differences between spoken utterance and written text.

  I.

  The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.

  —EMERSON, “CIRCLES”

  BIRD (THOREAU)

  1.

  The great stalks are alert, their

  shambles piled: maybe another parade.

  An evident gray, a slow march

  and legions rudderless; an ordinary flow.

  These none of them quite real, none present,

  like mischief in a dream: the blue garment, the rusty blade.

  Came late or have you come late or are you, you are late

  then on into wakened sobriety’s itch.

  The great stalks move slightly. They press back.

  Waiting folds upward into a shape

  to be seen later, or not seen, not now, not later.

  Take hold of this garment, this was said.

  The thrust of these injunctions. Take hold of the blade.

  2.

  Stepping man is stiff in the shade.

  Let him be, or chop him down.

  At the far side of the miserable hill

  an orchestra is rehearsing for the factory’s ball.

  As usual, a train is near, but there are no feet.

  The wheels peel off into global dust

  and there is flesh, naked flesh, exposed to it.

  Where were you? asks stepping man.

  Where are we? you answer, taking shelter.

  In the other, invisible mode I glimpsed him

  walking away, toward the river, into a meadow.

  The head of stepping man is bowed. He

  seems to be alone in history, alone in the brush.

  3.

  Stepping man: cowed, immobile, an

  invention of the nude season; an invention of

  new arrivals and the one tulip and

  beating of the woman with a baseball bat.

  He stepped on her face.

  Hear these enactments

  or forgo them in their temporal settings.

  The material of the world? Will?

  How the Jesuit and the young woman

  might have walked along an avenue in 1960

  and then, this long, this far away

  in the tangle of the bare, emergent copse.

  Stepping man recalls Thoreau and is envious.

  4.

  Drab us; lonely sequitur. Stepping man, distilled,

  no more than a fake. Quaint acquisition, no

  more than material fiction

  to see or not to see. He

  cannot look up, and the light

  drifts across his shoulders

  as the river slinks on to curse

  his rigid stride:

  New York, Albany, Troy, then

  night and the music he might have known.

  Stepping man, burning ash, the bird’s

  quick target—carries the sky on its back.

  DEAR BLANK

  The instant quarantine on its shelf.

  Deletion ranged upward, proto-winged,

  enough to go on, as if singular.

  To then, if it were then

  it looks like you are writing a letter

  interrupts Knowledge, whose source cannot

  be owned. Try not to fall apart.

  Try to stay on the case, in case you need to fall

  into speech, example, It looks like you are writing

  a letter. To whom it may concern.

  To be then concerned.

  And so the unobserved passes through its glass

  twilight. Hitched to its seam,

  a spectacle tangles with a spider

  caught among settings, conquests.

  Nowhere does the announcement flair,

  nowhere does the excepti
on pertain.

  The refrain, its indifference and scorn,

  travels into the familiar trace of the already consumed.

  Abstraction, the stagnant sign, becomes a wager.

  And yet, one wants to say and yet,

  night will come down over the water

  and the train will approach its final destination.

  She will turn her attention to leisure—

  the good car, the good china, the good rosé.

  Some eccentric ground will form under the atmosphere

  where the bones lie, where the burned books

  nourish the lilac. She will recall a friend’s comment,

  It looks like you are writing a letter.

  Would you like help?

  Others escaped. They will not sign their names.

  They will stay for a while on a Greek island

  while a child is conceived in another country.

  She will say that its name must be pronounced

  the same in French as in English

  in the vicinity of the letter, in the habit of grace,

  like, or unlike, the disinterested bird.

  And so the generic is elicited from under the hood

  along with anything winged, or sudden,

  small in its habit and domain.

  Witnessing the close, collecting the stuff,

  counting the days until

  what is pronounced comes into view

  as a picture of a criminal or a lover or a child.

  Remember? What was the name?

  Dear Dick, Dear Pris, Dear Jen, Dear Tom.

  ANTS IN THE SUGAR (BLANCHOT/MALLARMÉ)

  1.

  She puts the beginning into moist stuff, vague

  but substantial

  among attributes. She puts the beginning in

  as thought or as dream

  but not to be praised or worked over,

  not to be given to enterprise. She puts it in.

  Something closes around it.

  What then? Tireless, flamboyant sequence. Guards running beside the car

  like so many fish tagging a whale’s belly,

  a girl shines and flips like a coin,

  goldfinches loop

  among branches of crab apple.

  Nature not at all present

  and the present not present

  at any beginning.

  Quickening, surrender,

  failure and omission coincident

  what rots out a trophy scent

  trots out its song

  phantom aptitude

  for which there is only a parade

  moving through its sleeve

  bringing the last to the first

  parting the ritual valve

  coming farther out

  into the mere field

  one leans back on the field

  as if it were a wall

  leans asking

  Who is at the helm?

  Who is leading this astray?

  Who is behind the wall?

  Who has bagged the plot

  has issued forth the command

  taken the recipient from the prize

  canceled the flight

  mocked the apparition of time

  as not necessity, not damage, not a call

  who nags

  exposed to the sky

  not to disclose its departure

  nor its initial tug

  as if it were a wall of light

  flipping waves onto our links

  as error illumines small white marks

  enfolding the circus:

  trails of dark ephemera

  hasty attachment to the real.

  2.

  Baffled: where is the beginning, how will it open?

  Not to anyone, a daisy or the various

  floods over and above

  the diaristic song

  zones of retrieval

  masked onto names

  to say hurry now hurry

  from the rude gaps of wind

  cloistered by the throat

  the vigilant stem

  arousal from stupor lifting its head

  to be silenced and to begin again

  rhythmic shelter hello

  echoes

  hello

  Who and who is listening?

  Provision gripped

  loosened from its tether

  most narrow abatement

  along the slope of the sound’s appraisal

  what was heard

  in the sanctity of the inner ear: w/ a/ e/ r

  we

  are

  we

  wear

  we

  war

  echo

  so feeble as to be

  enchanted

  if it were to return as itself

  if it were to respond

  that which repeats

  I told you so

  at risk of beginning

  as if stepping across a bridge

  where there is no bridge

  sending a note

  when there is nothing of note.

  3.

  Ants in the sugar.

  I am waiting to calm down.

  Ants in the sugar.

  I am hoping to exit this stratum.

  Who is that man walking along the road?

  Who is that young girl in the pink dress?

  Ants in the sugar.

  4.

  Foregrounding a static molecule.

  Spectral instant.

  Maybe something is arrested, maybe

  an elemental marker but not as yet present.

  Could wander away? Could be at last lost?

  The steps, the path,

  filtered through the single static molecule,

  did they come through passages of debt,

  coming back across the field, avoiding the story?

  Through the blue glass and across the nodding limbs,

  dragging its shadow but staggering nevertheless:

  accurate zombie with a license to foretell.

  Logic in ordinary garb approaches.

  Not dissimilar to a job offer, or a court decision.

  Also not a simple ordinance or sequence

  on the lap, in the garden, after the initial hurrah.

  Moon quest arrives in late twilight; moon quest

  announces another go-round under the tutelage of sound,

  ever sweet, ever persuasive in rendition.

  The moon and the piano in accord,

  as if distilled from smoke, a

  pale yellow suspended in a pale blue.

  Some darker visual incidents, some stray sounds.

  Nature not present. Moon not present, not as moon.

  5.

  Feed the acid-loving plants.

  Imagine the future.

  Ants in the sugar.

  That craft might collide with being, being

  with others. That the blood might inhale toxins.

  These, others: for example, the this or the that.

  That she would withdraw, and the thing

  would stink. That the body would exaggerate its claims

  with its routines, its vitamins, its hurt ensemble.

  That the cat would die in her arms.

  That they would rush to the river to see the sunset.

  That the dead girl’s father would offer stones for the cairn.

  That the instant would contain precision.

  That the iris could be a definition.

  That the shape of things to come would take another shape.

  That the invention of the end is linguistic.

  For Charlotte Mandell

  INDICTMENT WITHOUT SUBJECT

  From the bourgeoisie tribe an aspect of looking.

  The near settles in.

  The near is rejected by the bourgeoisie tribe.

  The bourgeoisie tribe

  settles among its kinsmen

  and adds to itself.

&
nbsp; It watches the wasp struggle in bleach.

  It erects implausible glass.

  It brings into view the hanging man.

  It enjoys the spectacle.

  It copies out the printed day.

  The bourgeoisie tribe makes babies.

  The babies cry I want.