the muddled middle of the road
you fall back on (regression toward)

the handholds where you scrabble up
whatever (ways and) digits grip,

and muscle (lean and) to a stand—
legs set, arms wide, Vitruvian—

above the solid, square-cut point
of (as in golden) something Meant.




Wall Work

a paradelle of falling to pieces

The cracks I fought with knife and spackle: back.
The cracks I fought with knife and spackle—back
in spite of spent summers, bristled with labor.
In spite of spent summers, bristled with labor,
cracks bristled in spite. Summers, I fought them,
back spent with spackle and the knife of labor.

Beneath the moldering skin and mask of plaster,
beneath the moldering skin and mask of plaster
a winter’s trickle of ice-dam seepage drains.
A winter’s trickle of ice-dam seepage drains.
Beneath the skin, while the moldering mask of the ice
drains winters, seepage damns a trickle of plaster

whose always-failing fall in a dust of crumbles,
whose always-failing fall in a dust of crumbles
patters trouble into the maddened ear,
patters trouble into the maddened ear
whose failing maddened Fall. In a patter of dust,
always, trouble crumbles into the ear.

Winter’s skin cracks. The knife crumbles to dust.
Always, beneath the masque of maddened summers,
Trouble’s dam is in labor. Who’s fought while spackle,
in seepage of ice, is moldering with the fall?
Its patter trickles spite into the ear.
I bristle back at the plaster, failing and spent.




Stream


At an on-ramp light for westbound 94,
where billboard-big, fake-Oriental letters
claque for “Art Song’s Chicken Wings!” she’s snagged—

yanked back to the sun-warmed flow of Lieder,
where Schubert’s trout, alive in the piano trill,
twists in the air with a shaken spray of droplets
and leaps away, as the song says maidens must,
from the line, the seductive craft of the fisherman,
whom she can picture there in his hip waders
but who had nothing to do with it, in fact,
because the songs themselves seduced her, crooning
Give me thy hand, thou fair and tender vision,
angling with hidden barbs: the love of an art
the world shakes off, the meathooks of her loans,
the slivers of her opera-chorus pay
with all the other fish, landed and flopping,
who started again (da capo now! clean entrance!)
the baritone retrained in medical records,
the tenor’s hands at the wheel of the 16A,
the thousand thousand coloratura coders,
dreams of beauty shuddered away like water,
lost, all lost, no time to mourn them now

—because the signal snagging her has blinked
to green, and she must leap, must hurl herself
into the churning stream, where it’s a hazard
to hesitate, to dwell on things, to breathe.

Your name, take
thirty-three times at bed
or as needed,
gather two or more
in your name to
bring you to us,
please us.
Practice your names
no less than half an hour
each day or as directed,
remember with your last breath
to remember you,
bring us to you,
O rest O rest O rest.

O Beloved, you icon,
ascetic,
work ethic.
O illusor,
sustainer,
divine unwinder,
O twice-garlanded you.
O tincture, toddy, tongue.
O eyelid, toe tip, lung.
O body. Beyond.
O beyond-beyond too.

Slipper, you slip in, you spoon
our comforter-covered us,
you heavy our blankets,
rub our soles
and shoulders.
You swell and gush,
you prompt,
you hush,
you lull,
you lust,
you lotus,
O recall us all,
you all.




Application for Remembrance

Watchword, may you
grace my lips before meals,
may I sleeptalk you,
butter you up,
simple syrup you down.

Mindful, I balance my heart on my head to start,
my practices are stopwatched and enumerated,
pill-sized pronouns,
proper names,

but you—
every word is your name—

I recite you by heart, both speak
and hear your part,
inhale your iambs
on every throb and every stride,
enjamb you, try you, test you, cross you,

but you—
offer me a cigarette,
acclimate, endorse me,
then make me smoke outside,
chasten me, incite me, addict me sick
then snuff me—

hold my tongue.
Done.
Damn you,
overheard and obscured,
dream you, déjà vu you,
et tu, et tu, et tu.

May I let you down,
may I let you down easy,
swallow the smoke,
every gulp
another irrecoverable,
wet-eyed choke
toward you.




Lover’s Complaint

I spring-clean,
prune turned petals from the perennials,
donate my shirts to thrift shops,
and out-the-legs clothesline my verbs.
Pledging not to retain even my personality, I purge—

Then you show up on the doorstep
of the house I’ve heaved for you
when I’ve just about given up.
Your sandals throbbed flat,
sadra sweat-soaked and see-through,
you trace the perimeter, skim the gauzy drapes
which kitchen windows billow—

or you deliver a delicate parcel:
the halved heart
evicted for your stay—
your stopover—
your layaway—

or you hastily inhabit
the hollow of the hand
I hold out to you,
sloughed, rebuffed—

I may When?
I may When? again,
offer all,
and all and all,
but you won’t come in
till my beam breaks
and ceiling falls,
till I at last sacrifice
my least device,
my only keep,
my hard-won,
diamonded
belief—

Through fields of twitching feet,
     by streams of cramping calves,
our bassinet lamps leading home—
     in all the trees,
mouths opening for thumbs.

We’re taking the layette steps up,
     swinging our thick robe door,
padding our slippers across our lint floors
     in our rooms with the nightshirt walls,
our roof a sheet snapped,
     air-pocketing down.

The people familiar here—
     do you? but no, you don’t know them,
each wrapped in a private version.
     Here are the fathers, same
clean-edged lips,
     but their cries without words.
Here are the mothers, same
     close-up lips, but their songs
without words.

We’re all wearing hunstman and plaid,
     all in sock monkeys,
action figures, flying saucers,
     matching sets of planets and cats.
We’re stiff in our sizing, we’re late,
     it’s starting, we’re two trains away,
three lakes away, it’s started, we’re late,
     riding bikes rippling wheels like fried eggs
to a new place that looks like the old place.

Window of wafting,
     window of bear.
This cool breeze, what is it,
     winter sweet, and from
where? Softly, softly,
     fresh laundered cotton
settles a white
     whistling mask on our faces.

Then I Could Sleep

If I were scrap in the scraps, match in the box of matches.
If I were sleeve over sleeve in the washer.
If I were dirt in the dirt.

If I were one among gene-matched tomatoes,
Row in a crate of apples.
If I were, in the lipstick display, the pattern of lipstick end-labels.
If I were an ounce.

If I were wood.
If I were splinter, the ouch,
One o in the whole world’s long ouch.
If I were the road.

If I were postcards, same boring attractions.
If I were where you turn left at the sign, minus the sign.

If I were risen, punched, risen.
Or patted by hand, set hot on the table,
Eaten in less than a minute.
If I were shenanigans, Stop that right now,
If dad were reading, if I were the air
flying up from the pages.

If I were potato.
If I were winter and winter the only season.
If I were, absent a heart, abstraction of heart rate.
If I were dead, and dead
The only state.

My Duvet

Fringy, with hecklers.
Rag of a fortune, crag of a flock.

Pom-poms clocked. Alarming valerian.
Mushmelon, pumpkin, baffle of beams.

Bubbles with their hackles up.
Balloons, so carefully quilted.

Behind the closed sign, calliope pumping.
Snowprints squabbling the clearing.

Said the squirrels, Cannot visit now,
We’re too busy resting.

Said the settee, Cannot pouf, too mousy.
Said the hearthstones, Can’t rock, we’re spinning.

Said Polly, Well, crack my pot.
Answered Bantam, Chipper, chipper.

To every one, her tuffet.
Every way, perfume.

I. Difference from Garden

Subtract first the view.
A garden depends on enclosure—
garden, girdle, and girth
from the same root.

In the riverside park
there is now a public garden.

Plant and trim hedge
by rule and conventions—
artificial conditions.

Plots divided
lovely rectangles
     separated by chain
link and rose bush.

matters horticultural, botanical
and on a small scale decorative.

Gardens overgrown
show neglect. Park
something to grow into.

essence of gardening
having been withdrawal.

II. Landscape

Strips scenery from scene to consider only ground
a means to rule out view. Above garden, then tree.

I feel a separation.

Scape from the same root
and same significance with ship,
e.g. in friendship.

A garden is coveted. Each plot
is numbered and gated. Many times

a substantial vine limits
how much I can see. A very specific rose
is pulled through the fence.
Not at all landscape but only elements,
incidents, and features of the materials
of landscape.

At my back
     there is a park.
     A wide path bending
around open center,
     not following the curve
     of the river, reeds
six feet and higher.
     Look up. Consider
     how branches reach
          in multitudes. Consider horizon.

III. Thereby, design.

there was placed a bend
and where wandering
might export us. Observe
the wind working a very specific
grouping of trees. A duck
waddles past. The scent of rose
somewhere, yet scenery acts
in the emotional nature.
A certain sight is given. Trees
strike the city from the sky.

Autobiographical Passage: Wanderings

‘I can see that my pleasure began to be affected by      
conditions of scenery at an early age,’

Try conditions of sight. I put my gaze to the ground. I
remember the pine needles and pinching them between my
fingers. While over my head a muted gray/green persists,
the few needles that fell cluster. There is a pattern to the
falling and the slow stack built by the breeze. The needles
then, since brittle, would break. I held things in my hands

‘,—long before it could have been suspected by
others from anything that I said and before I began
to mentally connect the cause and effect of
enjoyment in it’

although, knowing how much I spoke I suspect that
speaking of this love for the feeling of the breaking would
have been voiced but no one thought enough of it to repeat
it back to me so I could claim it as memory

‘….my parents thought well to let me wander as
few parents are willing their child should’

though permission was let within a range. I’d stake the
same ground over and over, stay in sight, but the eye could
wander. I’d stay huddled under that same pine grove,
protected from the elements enough to poke and prod the
earth and stain my shins with sap and soil. Restless, yes,
enough to shift gaze from pine to chickadee, but the range
of the world was not yet within range of the senses.

Special Attention

‘Something accrues…’

some tree
and scenery
surrounding

(to any
one) as a
natural growth

or increment;
by way of addition

increase
felt over time

or distance,
becoming
ever green

‘…from special attention…’

To fix is to firm.
We specialize and
speed precision.

Stand here
and hone in
on what gaze delivers.

An evergreen provides consistency.

The grass, however,
turns green
to gray as seasons
shift and sieve
out attention.

Cast shadows
are in
diminishing returns.

Attention is a form
of homage
(someone said this,
and I am with her)

‘…continuously directed…’

so continuum
accrues focus.

All speed
reaches tree
with fresh force

‘…for many years to a particular field…’

years giving
time
and field giving
space

‘of observation and reflection…’

this ground is open.

The needled
leaves become some
line directing my gaze,

and the horizon
slopes separately

a lens formed
on a given gray day
vetting me valuable
solace, silence, and sentences

‘…giving counsel about it…’

I take this
and bring it
to a table.

A Bullish Run into Chambers

When a stranger is killed and laid to rest
at an altar for Public Mass of Remembrance,
African violets torn from a window’s sun
buttery as a tea cookie or rose petal,
prim Queen Anne’s lace for Diana,
buttery herself and silky, a fallen sulky,
for a child we will never meet,
a teenager who standing is caught
in crosshairs of our blood extravaganza,
aren’t we allowed our impersonal grief?
We pay to be hollowed by cinematic gore,
are immunized against capitalism’s rule:
a business must grow. The word was gore,
a bullish run into chambers born bursting
and broke. Along chain-link fences,
at street corners and Buckingham Palace,
wobbly petals mark our bid to be human.

A Territory of the Miracle

Cool the crude map
fired in your dark palm.

Slip around 1 corner,
then 2, 3, next
4. 4 corners squaring off
with Fate: It’s a start.
(Times x, a lifetime.)

Now a dusty path to
green sorrow growing shoots.
Stop short of the bog.
A shape will approach,
reach for,
comfort, your weeping
And that outshining ray of
sun with tumbled motes,
spinning cities—
take the keys—
incorporeal shrines glinting,
imbuing strength
to leave the haze.

A territory of the miracle.

There is no quantification
of smallest powers
which propel.

We’re always in a room.

So you can find us,
there’s a window in this one
with a view in
of us struggling
not to be a satellite to life
but to be the thing itself
flowing with exquisite humiliation
one day and awe
of the blossom
another, of the petal’s curve
and tenuous connection
of renewal and loss, of us,
meteoric and immovable . . .

and certain to bring heavy rains: a form of narrow

-ing, but okay it’s happening and happening to me

You said something else: you decide to not
burden your family with troubles and a gap
grows the distance between you and all else:

troubles pass and an afterward assumes you:
notwithstanding: you remember that before
you spoke there was a moment and it sang:

You worry about me worrying about you
on this cold day in December (this month
full of no’s) and as it begins to snow you
wait in your drafty home for me to phone.

These streets, these corridors,
this narrowing,  a fingerpoint

-ing snowstorm paralyzes my

street except for police mega-
phones  MOVE THAT CAR!

Even though I keep the thermostat on 60 degrees
I’m going to know that I’m at home in each room
& at the same time by various forms of dim light

-ing, various slants of.  And I’m not lesser today.

The heaviest book in the library basement was stripped of gilt
by all those fingers whispering along its edges. I had
to handle it to learn its name. Open me, open me, it said—
finishing, as I splayed the leaves, and you will regret
it forever.
              Dear Necronomicon, when I dream now
I rehearse the birth-pains of the human world, our battles
with original monsters, the fires that burned so long.
Your formulas scribble themselves across my vision
like a migraine. Your tables, ideographs, obscene
incantations have rewritten the chemical messages
my cells transmit, and I seem to be printed with gibberish,
degraded codes. I know how to raise the dead from their salts
but cannot get out of bed. The doctors’ scripts—oh plain
illegibility!—flutter down, washed into the gutter by autumn
storms. I fear that if I rise again I will leave a slug’s
silver trail to the regions you describe, and that trail will be a map,
and some innocent soul will read it and betray herself thereby.




Woman Using the Men’s Room

All summer stroking carved
woodwork, Greek letters and quaint
obscenities on the ancient stall doors,
while men in their undershirts hack
the women’s lavatory to rubble.
My brain is in my fingers, in my tail,
like a dinosaur’s. Ezra wrote
in a canted chair so that seminal fluids
could pool in his skull. My brain wanders,
chews at the treetops, goes for a swim.
Does it surprise you that I am an animal,
an extinct animal? In the future,
scientists will study my dung.  Now
I urge the conceit too far, but who
can be a genius when each bodily
function requires strategy, an expedition?
Here in the men’s room the mops
dawdle in corners, their long sad
gray hairs crusted with old
similes, dry as a sorority,
as a dean’s tear ducts.
Now they have turned the water
off and my poems are thirsty but
it is better this way, crumbling to dust
as the air conditioner sighs intellectually,
no need to haul my lizard guts
to the burial grounds, just the stone
feet of Ozymandias enduring until
September when the beautiful delicate birds
return, freely fornicating midair.

Rumpelstiltsken

2003

Ruth’s a fine name, he argues, but Evelyn’s the queen
of grandmas—she hangs up without saying goodbye.
The leaves quibble and his pregnant wife shrugs.
Her silence wobbles the hot brine in her belly
and the fetus wakes, removes a pleasantly fat and salty thumb
from her mouth, and gazes up through red-lit membranes.

2006
Some smiling adult places the cordless phone to her ear.
It’s the sea in a shell: a grandmother’s voice through a veil
of golden hair, through space, broken into data and rebuilt
into presence.  She doesn’t believe it’s her nana without the smoky
waft of coffee, a soft body pushing air through those words.
She doesn’t believe they are words.  Yes, she says.  Yes, yes, bye.

[once upon a time]
The woman who made a promise sends messengers into the woods.
The first day, they just sit on a stump and eat cheese.
Returning, they lamely offer their queen: Tom, Dick, Harry.

You’ve heard this story before. Shortribs, Sheepshanks—
other bad-luck monikers not in your name book.
On the third day, one discovers a little man gloating over his bet.

2019
Ruthie Evelyn Miller King dabs on some kiwi lipgloss.
Her best friend has just earned her license and they’re driving
to a party in the county. The radio plays a tune

we can’t imagine yet and they sing along.
It’s a hot wet night. A cute boy with curly hair is awkwardly
quiet.  She dares him, Bet you can’t guess my name.

Bicameral Woman

Sometimes I draft similes for writing instead of writing.¹ Alternately, I forage for brainfood.² Yesterday I was reading about a book by Julian Jaynes on the origin of human consciousness because he has a theory about why people hear voices, and the book I am not writing concerns poetic voice. Jaynes, a biologist, argues for a prehistoric creature he calls “bicameral man,” split into an executive part and a follower. Even in the present day, he theorizes, the left-brain speech center controls our conversation, while the apparently dormant right-brain speech center offers advice in stressful periods through auditory hallucinations.³ Time! I check my watch, slam down the book, and lope off to pick up my children. While we catch our breath and graze,⁴ we talk about my third-grade daughter’s invisible friends, a dinosaur and a monster who began visiting when she was two.⁵ I am surprised to learn that she still hears from them. She “pretended” to take them to school in her hair last year and “pretended” that they gave her the answers to tests. She rarely sees them anymore now that she is so old, and they do not come when she calls, but sometimes she can feel their presence.⁶ When she describes the sensation she taps the right side of her head.⁷

_____________________________________
¹ Writing a scholarly book is like climbing a mountain in flippers.
² There are no chocolate-orange biscotti in my sabbatical office. I look down from a modular building through a twin-boled oak at a wooded trail. A hidden creek occasionally sends emissary dragonflies to bump against my window.
³ Before Grandfather Ape was quite conscious, then—when he could talk a little but was not able to exercise abstract thought and remember what he wanted from the creek an hour ago—he might have wandered out to the rocky edge of the water and looked around foolishly. At that point the right brain would issue a verbal hallucination: “Mmm, cress, good with mammoth cutlets, Grandmother might have sex with you if you bring this home.” Grandfather thinks he is hearing the river god.
⁴ Havarti and plums.
⁵ Her invisible friend dinosaur was named “Friend Dinosaur” and her invisible friend monster was named “Friend Monster.”
⁶ Sometimes I seize words like slippery fish from the water, one at a time with dreadful effort, and they taste terrible. Sometimes they leap up from darkness and they are delicious.
⁷ I suppose I should just perch on the river rocks in my big wet dirty flippers and breathe the thin air. The gods might tell me what to eat. Or maybe they won’t. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

The road is built-up earth, I say to her despite
her disbelief that a road could be anything natural
like a land bridge connecting two masses—
like us watching our own migration
as if our four feet together are woolly mammoth feet
as gigantic as the continents we wear on the bottom
of our shoes, the imprints carving out a story
of a chase, a game played by hungry bellies, the world
of our stomachs round, empty, and rolling
ahead, our stomachs tied to a sled like sleigh dogs,
a whip in my hand, the leather strap unfurling like a road
that meets the round-ball earth, an eye squinting
at a destination—this destination just a word with no station,
a word undefined by arrival because arrival is always
followed by the gaggle of departures, those goose-wing birds
we keep in the garden until the weather gets cold—


Sasquatch

Set up the yard with boxwood shrubs
& butterfly bushes. Don’t mow the grass.
Take down your fence if you have one.
Make sure your lawn chairs are set
to recline. Try to make yourself
approachable as you design your yard.
Be subtle enough in movement that dogs
don’t bark, that stray cats rub
against your pant leg and purr.
Make it so your presence puts a polar bear
to sleep. Be as quiet as a colony
of ants. Be the lawn
chair in your yard. Be the shrub. Be the bush
or butterfly and don’t make a sound.
Don’t be frightened at the size
of its feet. Don’t snap a photo.
Don’t move an inch. Be the grass.
Be the air and the breeze. When you feel
you’ve done all you can,
be a shadow, be what it’s like to hide behind
what’s already hidden. When you’ve done this,
when you think you are truly ready, stop thinking,
and right at this point—become what
trusts itself enough to be seen.


Nose Box

I went to the butcher shop
for a pair of lips. I wanted to give
a gift, a kiss.

They were all out.

I moved on
to the next counter, above a pair of lungs,
to a nose in a jar. A nose? I remembered
a story about Inuit greetings—
the kunik—by pressing nose and upper lip
against the skin & breathing in,
they warm the Arctic air. Pure magic.
Convergence of mountains,
each with a tunnel
to the lungs, passion’s hub!

So I clinked my coins,
did the math, reached in,
asked for a box & gift wrap—

who can hide from a nose?
This puts out exactly
the message I want to send:
honest, intimate,

even slightly phallic,
right here, swaddled
in this box—
not a kiss, but a rub,
a sniff, a touch,
& the chance
of being left
breathless.

 
Let Go

Enough of your allegations and ill will!
You are not the only one whose job was discontinued.
In every directorate there were insufficiencies
and before the re-org,
wasteful redundancies across the board.
Headhunters brought in new blood.
Can you fault us for receiving?

Year to year, you could wander from floor to floor
and still not locate your corner office!
We took the walls down,
we set up modules, supple spaces.
Even the desks have wheels.
Flexibility is the core skill these days
and you were never made of pliant clay.
Fired to the breaking point is what you were,
shards are what you’ve become.
You are not useful to anyone anymore.

]]> http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/poetry/3-poems-by-lisa-mari-martin/feed/ 0 http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/poetry/three-poems-from-a-florilegium/ http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/poetry/three-poems-from-a-florilegium/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:00:16 +0000 Anna Lena http://www.fringemagazine.org/?p=4317  

mine eyes have dazzled days
frightened in electrical storms
            of the ‘phone, of the lamp
anemone means wind: opened
by wind? spread by wind?
“flourish in the wind” or wood; beauty’s tears, love’s blood, etc. etc.

clematis with filaments twisted
            creeper
like serpents, like Medusa’s
spiral stems allow the floating female
come to seek comfort
            contumely
dearer than beauty

& a picture of cocaine or cocoa
imaginary medicine
“varied pleasurable thoughts and associations they suggest”

in wet weather, Lady’s Mantle
                        ours diamond-fringed
                                    Philosopher’s Stone

many narcissus were lost for two centuries
            mirror
            pond

Queen of the Dead
            Lady    ly         Night-
                                    shade
night blooming, periodic
Mona Lisa on              black velvet
a Gothic beauty delights artists
named after the authoress of Insects of Surinam
whereof no mention by any old ancient writer
            nude
a new name had to be found

the hundred-tongued bird
eats the bitter berries
torch-thistle
chosen
            rare, novel
stinking hellbore
            wort
to cure worms

Flower Freaks

freak forms of the primrose and cowslip
even depicted
            in the muzzles of guns
renown in other battlefields
Hortus             exhortation      rather than merit
a hard-fought peace    a pestilent agitator
make men as mad as they please
            no, just a Quietude, a Nouvelle Vague
                        on location      jungle mists
“our places near vast forests and often inaccessible terrain”
sea-holly of inland fields—contradictory, anomalous
before flowers are perfected: dolphins
dauphins

to supply ideas to designers
of embroidery, textiles, ceramics
            “subject
                        to the green fly”

the preface is a history of embroidery
“dew drop on leaf” school
sign-manual

Still Life with Mandolin


for Ada Limón


sound hole of seeds: a thumbnail moon to strum the strings of a lyric body: nourishment and lullaby: blue curtain night: greensleeves on greenleaves: ear twitch: god tonight the animals want to sup on the tender flesh of music: sprout tune: vibrate: glisten: sprout and root: fill the room with acoustic aroma: tart sweetness: seed queen: lean into lyric wondering: tendril and pluck: the musicians gather: fruit heart: they bow: they plead play in the new day




Spellbound Ball


for Patricia Wallace Jones


this evening the ghosts are rising up to dance in the old fashioned way: the piano has a ghost of a cello in its eye: it says love in the same dark key all night: spectral gowns sweeping the floor: the wood of the instrument still remembers being a try: but it is so difficult to put that into notes: lion’s paw piano leg: a mustache of keys: the ghosts get closer to their partners: elaborate merry-go-round: you want to touch the face of the piano: you want to sit with it a while: talk the way you always do: in another key