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  who know nothing of our latest crimes

  stealth, lies, cruelty, women stoned, girls stolen, one abuse after—

  A doll, let’s say again a doll, dressed in her conceit dress,

  flounced, elaborately tied, buttons, bows,

  tiny underthings, smalls and smaller smalls, white socks,

  black shoes with laces. It

  does not age, it fades, molds, rips in the ways that beset things.

  Is this a lyric? Can you tell me if this is a lyric?

  It is about a doll, which is a thing and also an image, one

  kind of thing image. Anyway, there is a doll.

  A “female,” or else a cross-dresser, doubtful, but

  an interesting idea for an image.

  You would have to lift up her petticoats.

  Is this the same doll? Is it archival?

  Is it part of a collection, people have collections of dolls,

  they are serial doll lovers.

  I have had many dolls, and many lovers.

  Does this make me a lyric poet?

  Am I singing now, the way the doll might have sung

  something from “Guys and Dolls,” a musical,

  in which there were lyrics I once knew by heart.

  If I know things by heart, does this make me a lyric poet?

  If I substitute the word “God” for doll, does that make me a religious poet?

  “They are serial God lovers.”

  “I have had many gods, and many lovers.”

  “Something from Guys and Gods, a musical.”

  “Am I singing now, the way God might have sung?”

  In this substitution, a gull flies out,

  and it cries real tears. Does this make me a nature poet,

  a metaphysical poet? A god is an intellectual thing.

  M. AND F. AT THE K.G.B.

  Trickily absorbed into ekphrastic juvenalia

  shot from the hip. Think I’ll listen to Emmy Lou

  before the fervor of the andante.

  Shostakovich, plural and harmonic

  but repeated over there, in the mud

  with young boys and their tools, their faces

  sweating with boundary.

  Old goat’s lust for the worldly arena.

  A woman of emendation, a man of domestic glass

  came to speak to us before our trip,

  upbraid our vague dilemmas

  and such quotidian enunciations as the Dow

  beyond what we might have witnessed

  in the early homespun riot

  before the colossal carried us off into infrastructure

  inverting the usual designation of

  girl-boy trials—she

  tracks the insignia of thought, thinks the bleachers

  will hold, he would open each flower, blossom

  in the appellant of a kindly disciple: Moses, one shoe off,

  rises to the tinsel bush. She is

  recursive, belonging to an addition, like a

  good logic, marries Mayakovsky to the sublime

  as she submits her laws to our court.

  His entreaty to come through the kitchen door

  rivals concordance, and so

  they agree: trot trot trot to a different beat.

  PRECISION TUNING

  Curtailed argument for small alert

  less than alert contaminated

  singular

  came as thought

  thought contrived instances of good

  the good night captured

  illegally captured drawn smoke

  without looking up smoke rises through slots

  drastic in the slotted spoon or held

  Annunciation’s drastic fidelity

  still following as faithful thought

  hurt its lungs, slept.

  Such incipience must conjure new ordeals

  ordeals specific to this

  this being troubled by sanction

  so that the sanctions come from above

  as if rain, from above but superimposed.

  The superior army imposed

  the prohibited calm

  those who erase the calm rims of Enlightenment

  those who spend secular gold, light

  those who omit light

  who wear the feeble shawl of sobriety

  his mother in shawls

  father in custody

  the family custodian arranged chronologically

  without deviation children first second third

  trays of numbered slaughter.

  XYZ PLUS MINUS

  X

  ( ) settles in

  mirage person go! go!

  be punctuated be

  adroit

  ( ) settles

  dead one dead three

  thou sand thou one in the desert

  hi!

  ( ) settles

  why these should be removed

  and these later

  this plus this

  you have too many in your program

  you have too many ( ) in your ( ).

  and the exception to this rule is? And this object?

  We recommend you

  furnish ( ) with another

  and that you buy only what is

  transparent to the

  the eye.

  Is the eye a good judge?

  Y

  Knot.

  Aha, a little

  jokey pun.

  Jokes are a good thing

  under conditions of the non-joke.

  To untie the knot.

  Now?

  The heart is

  awakened by a small

  mis-

  take or de-

  lay or am-

  big-

  u-

  ity. Do you want to save

  the ex-

  changes you made

  to X?

  Z

  Let’s do the numbers!

  “Care, community, comfort”

  Dollar value?

  Wrong letter, wrong ( ).

  Offshore dummy corporations,

  ancient, ex-

  patriot,

  ex-

  change rates, moving

  with cash, suspicion,

  American practice.

  Paradise.

  cf Milton PL Book IV

  Satan

  Hell himself.

  Gates?

  Brand name angels.

  Everything fell.

  Z-1

  But not in love.

  This is the post-temporal, post-serial, post-

  A B Cs. Meeters & greeters

  not allowed to cross ( ).

  Z-2

  Some kind of rent relief.

  No one thinks that will happen this year.

  Music.

  Z-3

  Good Investment:

  Bed, Bath, and ( ).

  Z-4

  Announce personal hymn

  to make a chapel

  against wholesale ( )

  devolution

  ( )

  A cigarette burning down at high speed

  But there are X thousand people inside that cigarette.

  “Well what’s it like?”

  “Children.” ( )

  retail or retell

  Z-5

  More or

  less.

  Z-6

  The ancient came with me it was nothing I loved him

  4.2 miles a brief stretch in the car he could not speak.

  R/ENDINGS

  Votes destined to again unearth

  mirth in the fabric of the morsel. Please do not underline

  design my speechless-

  ness, not while I am still

  ill in the cave’s

  nave, resisting normal urges

  purges to get on with things

  cling. I doubt

  out of time

  lines, despite the impromptu gathering with ripe pears and cheese
<
br />   ease. I imagine the clocks

  rock, that the remainder is still

  drill sweltering, water arcing

  larking across the twilight

  blight, the tourists

  forest’s crumbled immensity

  density. Things continue to be planned ahead

  dread but I no longer want to risk the materials, and so have taken

  mistaken, fumbling, hoping for tact

  fact to be productive, if not the detachment and humor we have come

  dumb to expect.

  “Awash” in the inscrutable palette of roses

  roses unscented in the few

  new perfection. Music rides

  hides against honky-tonk beer

  cheer. The moon

  soon half full, never half empty. The second hand

  lands outside the circle and

  demand threatens to usurp the young road rats on the bus

  us, all our distractions seem arbitrarily chosen like a form

  norm of nostalgia in an indigo drawing: Whistler’s fog. The heart’s

  art, caged in its gauze, making a poor sound. Gears slip and now

  Dow it seems is being held up by so

  low many cheats, instantly assembled, not one exactly like another,

  others interchangeable. If a part hissed

  mist, then it was hissing for good. Were we dangling, inevitably a delay

  fade. Not anything I want, since delay’s advent

  meant sorrow. In truth, I have left, so

  go little by little, it seems as if

  life is a refutation. There is no one to comment or to abjure,

  lure the little enlightened spots, herds

  not words exactly, but what refuses to be underlined or condensed. One

  sun steals the day, this for

  more examples, the fog and the police car

  star sitting above the browning grass and thought

  wrought under the table. The cat is not dead but her eyes now wide

  died with wonder. I think it must be wonder.

  Everything quiet now in the zone

  clone of retrieval. Through casts of zeal

  real life narrows as a pipe carrying gray water to the zero gauge

  age of reproduction in its video mirror

  error’s blind truce among those who still matter

  latter loved, without courage, traced

  faced with the fools of redemption who came easily out of the widow

  ditto the indictment, ditto the harms

  farms and the industrial park

  dark collapse. Call this our time

  I’m lonely for the integrity of sacred life, not religion, but love’s

  troves, its coil around sex

  text comes after an ordeal of risk, the way we went back

  lack or crisis because we had neglected the loom

  room I suppose, even as the inventions are all for a violent solution

  revolution, quiet as a street at dawn, in a city, a city so sadly

  badly used.

  POSTSCRIPT

  And then these attenuated thistles.

  Spoken from the sink, from the adamant.

  There is no room, no

  more room. Stuffed to the brink.

  Object dispersed, whole into—

  agitated, fielded. Throw us a flake.

  Up to here. Up to the

  mouth’s bright contrast, its

  sponsored aggressive silence, held

  by interlocking dots.

  Chapel among the drawings.

  Trees up to their boughs in snow.

  Or this brim, above the giddy mechanics

  of instruments, their oiled

  dissonant animation, the clock,

  men with their staples

  behind sliding doors in white hats,

  the copper clad wall.

  Taking these in

  toward hibernating sorrow

  things having been seen, persons

  having drifted from view

  pink repercussions of the metal,

  a jacket, a cup.

  Ann Lauterbach was born and grew up in New York City. After college (University of Wisconsin, Madison), she attended Columbia University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, but moved to London before completing her MA in English literature. She lived in London for seven years, working variously in publishing and arts institutions. On her return, she worked for a number of years in art galleries in New York before she began teaching. She has taught at Brooklyn College, Columbia, Iowa, Princeton, and at the City College of New York and Graduate Center of CUNY. Since 1991 she has been Director of Writing in the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, where she has been, since 1999, Ruth and David Schwab II Professor of Languages and Literature. Lauterbach has received a number of awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986 and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 1993. She lives in New York City and in Germantown, New York.

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  ALSO BY ANN LAUTERBACH

  Also by Ann Lauterbach

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  r>

 

  Ann Lauterbach, Hum