JERRY #2
Laura Goode
I Can Disagree with You Over & Over
For E.W.
There were earwigs on the walls,
omnivorous & finned,
dirty sandwiches in the car,
servicemen lurking on the
lawn: you rose so early I could hardly
see the lake. Mummers & swale: Amen
in a striped jacket. These disparate fictions. Bisect
the hornet freeze & hear me when I tell you
I have been the worst kind of
hypotenuse;
I know it from the dreams,
Know
it in the somnium animale, in the skeletal memories, in the waking shakes
t h r o w n a g a i n
s t t h e w a l l
I distrust
blondes, but
relish a skeptic
Emily.
You
are my tawny
heart of down,
my sweet jack of
lakes.
The lake is the place,
Emily. Delirium
appeals &
We are only rehearsing the future.
I’ve never had
what one might call
a contractual relation-
ship with reality.
Once I made a museum
out of a Jameson
bottle & seven
green-blue beads:
carillons
pitched through
the sugar cycle,
spinning out the winnow.
The gloaming sheens there, on the romance of crime,
undeterred by maturity.
What valence can
we possibly contain?
Emily sleeps.
Emily sleeps on him.
& a reduction,
puckish as luxury:
Emily sleeps on him
in the antechamber.
Transitivity is a wind-
fall, & copulae complicate.
(There is a house in Wisconsin, Wolahan;
it moves me. Halfway down the dirt road
the half-shadow of a yellow bus
coaxes through the forest. I spin honeys
& aestivate on the shore, & never wake
before ten.
It is geometric in its woods,
the Goodes, & the ransom math of family.
The black bears are happy collaborators
but I sympathize little with the deer.
Kingfishers expire in
the chimney as quiet wires
striate the lake, provincial & mystic
all the same. My mother slept there
summers. My father never
sleeps.)
These italics mine, November.
Drop a poinsettia into the pot
for tea &
never fight a citation.
Laura.
Laura in dove grey.
Laura in dove grey, melted
into ash. Laura steals
an imitation tuna sandwich & liberates
two scarves & a cardigan. Laura emblazoned for
hours on a great A train.
Zeppelin coldlights anoint
the lakes of Minneapolis,
lost as bonfires & old
Swede towns: freshwater baptismals &
peregrine strays.
I have some things to tell you too, sage—
I’ve spent all this time trying
to steal the way home hurts.
Family names trailing
the sturm und drang of tin-can
teleologies, a shared saint’s name & lake-limericks
thickened by myth —
Forensic senses,
trapped in amber,
botched genealogies & the claw of knowledge:
the yunk of intrepid geese
to Canada, or
home
5 May 2007
With language taken from the Epistle Dedicatory to the King James Version (KJV)
Dear Ethan,
It looks like I’m writing a letter. It looks like a lot of these days are epistolary
these days, Occidental, harrowed
along the western edge of time. Perforated, most dread Sovereign,
is what I’m trying to say: buncoed in supposed & surmised mists,
bewildered. Be wilder, Ethan; among all our joys,
there was no one that more filled our hearts than the Craw
herself, the Craw who tore herself open like an axe-wound
& smiled like buffoons, the gaped stooge-pledge who saved ailing iguanas from
certain death & struck ululation in six Original Sacred Tongues, as it did
in many worthy men who went before us, who rampaged not to suffer
this to fall to the ground, but rather to take it up, swaggering manly
in that upward motion all men fear to lose. I am not a man. It cannot be ignored.
Ethan, you know lady zookeepers disport the zeal of Majesty
a Saturday in the beerlight here and there. I’ll take ego,
my bunglehearted id, but do know that among a throng
Your name is very precious, & they bless You in their hearts, as that sanctified body
who, under God, is the immediate Author of their true happiness.
Hell is Real,
Laura
P.S. Please write soon. There should be one more exact
Translation of the Holy Scriptures into the English Tongue.
As an Intensifier
How you are fallen from heaven
O Day Star, son of Dawn!
Isaiah 14:12
The queerest How, the way
God sometimes listened, to know
a silence Who has conceded
no intensity, none more than
You are named
naked & beautiful
the tender member’s
slumber
our emissary
& I have forsaken You
in order to What
in order to
write this, to stew denuded
over the side of the bed,
to depart from Your arms
to write how
I have forsaken
You my sensical desiderata
my cautious opera
my positive
I have forsaken You
to act the cannibal
make one last dumb crack
at reviewing the ruins
with whom I thought he knew
what smoldered in me
my vitriolic hinges
my Leviathan
my hide
ravished
ravaged
the pitch of it now, its shift
one undulating shadow
of a breast
on the dark wall
grapes
Wild grapes
Sense-
data
scalar
Astonishing calm
A palm
the Tarot of us
Nine of Christ
Five of Blinds
Lay of Names
the clement Self of Death:
Life of Poetry
but poetry isn’t Life
chase it West
My Dress Hangs There
I.
A mandolin’s voice disconnected, faraway—
the empty dress & no more portraiture,
funicular borders
disordered.
Banderole unfurled indistinct
from distance.
Ribbon on
the bomb,
not completion
nor complement.
Braver: change.
II.
Sapphire knot
just above the knuckle,
murderously close.
A thing against which one
can be leveraged.
An inlet; the dog-
faced dog.
Saucy broad.
Rare view of island
from sea, man-made
land tear
catastrophe
No spare
change.
New State wrought
on the fault
III.
Second city a shunt,
thin-veined eyelid slit,
& dollar oysters ensconced
in fog (Pretty
girl. Intimate triangle,
the doll of her,
the hispid persimmon.
She shimmies a trellis
on the balls of her feet,
honey-hunting
the schism),
vertiginous
or a film
called after your favorite
pen, its dynamic
action. The soundtrack
emerges from behind
the retreat
into a familiar egotism,
smarter than, a pressure mounting
between fingers
& envelope.
Though causality eludes,
a witnessed history
in a particular series of cities (NY, SF, &etc)—
notes wracking calendars
numinous strewn in the streets
displaced
IV.
Just once I felt something not to abstract
o landscape how fall the diurnal
what persists the
bedlam of love & tempest seven
blessings, listening this time, & older now