_______
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Ann Marie Fine
On purpose: for the staving off of
In this scene the edge of the sea
is a movement: an oracle-
like delineation of line and lore.
If you are lovely somewhere
you are also lonesome in that place; or
not you, but your loveliness is, and you
linger where longitudes scrape latitudes
in the air: for they are against each other.
And lead you to the edge where what is
good about being lost makes you ache for signs.
So, here are some answers to give beloved.
& they are not meant to set free, but
to lead you in the direction of when
you discovered this way: already
by surf & sand; you may go collecting for
shells near your ankles & you may absorb the radiant
punishment of the preoccupied sun; willingly: so
your onus is your capital; all is bright.
Do not put your will on automatic pilot.
Your body after all, takes
a colloquial name: sapient, ambulatory,
flesh, & is forgiven; and flesh forgives; so
your neck fills with salt in each crease to prove; Icarus
your arms remember & your arms
vibrate quietly, deeply, as your bones
tumble from a sky of red muscle.
This repetition of being
is homage to your over-hot heart;
intimate while unknownable, you are strung from it
by a sea’d song licking your eardrum
having no words; pressed
to the heat of some grain fused sea-sky; a reputation
fraught by unclocked winds, in you
bends you: you bend; hung
from your middle & pulled downward;
fingers prod wet granules; and push
as far as your wrists go; not searching—
not to be known, but gone inward
you would be loved—finding the go.
An odd accompaniment to the book of karma
Some of the images I worked with; this material from
envelopes, ripped printed paper, hands on fire—
scissors, queen Isadora, razorblade, inkwell, coffee: those
refutable stain patterns in the clouds. One key—aqui;
What I mean is your heart is an eye,
which is to say that you have a good heart
for good things we all might.
Take it into consideration: all the night-time
I spent humming myself to glue in the sound booth.
Torn strips of a stolen roll off medical tape; trying
to gain advantage over my bleeding hatches:
There is more than one way to compose a letter to a painter.
If I am on some boat with this; I take a walk—astern;
away from the table, toward where the beginning of the ship
sits low in the sea, low. Seat of propulsion, position
is where you put it; I agree. Like a mirror
agrees with whatever it opposes; as this
slippery devotion knows the winged-wake of the boat
& square of a stern. In the page I built
we woman around in lifejackets,
crack bright red lobsters on white porcelain; ignore
the sea travailing through the floor: I will let
the water prove there is no straight line.
Time breaks water, a meal in half; tension
in the mechanics of a woman’s fist— the American
Woman! is a broken time-piece I think I’m looking back
at; the winged shape of that scissored wake waking; breaks
and beats the distance between suns set & abyssal plane.
My hands pretend to be stained with bloody clouds
of krill; tinted a pathos-ian white-blue and complain
love’s not a night-cruiser; with all due respect.
Apogee blue
I have gone out at night, when too warm and there are too many bodies right now I don’t
understand. . . two things thinging at my temples; mis-describable; each orbiting at
opposite poles in the nearmost breathing space; a tangential succor for my wonder clad’d
skull.
A glass-like globe spins well light in fragile hollowness; (blue) the only
color it can not digest—being heavenly least; the globe between is very clear.
No-one will touch it. It is strong like an exact dream and could burn like abyssal rock
probably burns. What I want to call hearts go afloat—splay and thrum; breathing hearts
in breathingspace; religion the constantly globed.
This aroundness swallows whole prisms and leaves hollow little shapes empty of color;
but like tiny starfish doves, they drop against the glass and spin emptily. Never speaker
ing a friendlier kind of sound.
Seeing feathers as scale(s); some bone’s washed in light air as mute as flakes of isinglass. I
forget the ground immediately, then
my gorgeous pretended bodies don’t know or can’t remember how to love other forms—
the shape of arm, the wet of mouth, the press
of hand.
Time of day emergencies; magically sluice the sky of cleaned cloth. I make story of it I
hope my hands will someday tell; palatially speaking.
Below the tide creeps back and folds itself with salt and undertow; gulped by the cracked
earth like an anti-drink; reminding how the mouth’s involved in burial and birthing; my
grave swimminghole;
after which, I come to prefer the tide’s tale of all now; above which, the sky spits birds as
points of exclamation.
For the people by the people (and of)
Their faces were stroked by atomic telemetry, lightly
unfixed in slow-motion, but to no effect.
Ultimately; and that’s the problem.
There is sensory inflexion in this (landscape venue);
The style a pixilated smear of memorious memorandum
or something as serenely careful; as sleep.
Trumped by a cityscape acne of manipulated glass
up ending everything fantastic with fast
haunting cirrus clouds, both fast and haunting
they are forcibly whispered up as good ideas.
Territorial names begin to rumor bombs and go
all the way to big screen’s, glory mask, and no,
it ain’t pretty: Where’s your cousin now they seem to snap.
The harbingers of missing questions, also kin.
Cousin, I don’t know, is pretty much going to corner the deal.
And that’s a kind of answer we are addicted to.
These voiced fractions, splay’n slow & eggwhitely to shine
gut dolly-happy and hurt, like should know better,
Meaning better than to ask, but wait
a minute more and karaoke opera isn’t half bad
if for free or free now — how we endless jump ideals
framed by a class with champagne eyes
punk smarting from our leave from any big redressing.
Nothing sacred is a shard of truth that eats the rib.
Their ears are sear-cocked to the void of news(ome) noise
their friends are ours and crack right centerfold
until their increases are slighted by the honest dime.
A note is writ in code above the door, one word
that seems to speak of exits;
They will picture it, and go
and on their way, looking for the country
they case each character for nerve.
attempt at a happy thought
And now how to forgive the self? For some
questions remained unanswered:
They asked, how do I get to the broken parts
to record the ways our wholeness came undone?
Some obscure directions have been returned.
These new surfaces are sheened
with the dew of a momentous miracle;
are also [splintered & soaked]
picturesque and warm to the touch of a hand
not minding what might lie beneath it: [asunder]
This excites our small neighborhoods and shortly wakes
our vigilante imagination until we band
brashly together, and toss
various keys into the gallery of abstraction.
Courage exhibits its solitudes here
on canvases of tents, to represent “popular attitudes. . . ”
Until accidental gatherers go quiet (quietly) coveting;
the way some men will manage disrupted
space between accidents and themselves;
to be retaken up in the head with an old idea
balancing inexactly upright; we peer in.
Handed a cup of cold white wine; held aloft
by the hand not touching anything; is an odd fame.
Please don’t touch the art aside; there is still the aching.
An urgency to make a decision, instead
of form another “goodnews” opinion about it
[the expectation of Samaritan’s hour]:
But never mind. Original surprise long ago caused
only the disappointed to abandon future attempts
to dress up and go back in; after the mirror
turned out [sundry] upon further reflection
to be completely honest;
the rest becomes work. A wrecking work;
a way becoming our way to forgive—
Not just another way.
Row, Row, Row
In this pastime is. In this pastime is the occurrence of things infinite. In this pastime is infancy, and through this an imp of summer is born. The wait belongs to the whole race, and so the water and the rising. A septic shipment arrives afloat, and is acclaimed by no-one as its bearer’s bilge gulps and bulkheads drain; we come cobble-tongued in disarray. Packages marked language in black paint pronounce: courage mandrake, courage coffling; have courage when faced with festering gasps of the factotum. A few prisoners knew of this kind of delivery and typed out proverbial histories from their sepulchers. How wet they were. No-one listens, nor did them, nor will they. Circus chiefs were lionized by lost laws, and so the digital clicks of bewildered clickers go on the blank clock. Hope in the hopeland hoped hard, but sunk soft. Dampened as the man. Until random brightness’s, struck with sudden faith, cantilevered gigantic metal silences at the sky, permanently foiling the thundering gates of chaos. No no, said everyman, I am closed. Kill the dangerous ghosts! I also close my eyes, for distance is not hidden from us come kinds of spongy cancers; such a killing I will neither hide from nor such cancer come any kind of distance, or from mine. I think distance in fact should show itself, and help us pull.
O, Ohio! Who will hire us to manpower the desk junky’s manna machine? The fingerman, the joker and the line-cook will. They will hire us to exacerbate our own nomenclature and pay us television. Praise for your labor is not a problem, but pay for it, you will. Row by row.
Here are the chapters of the plebian caucuses, writ in management’s hand, writ in characters of idiocy, writ in hokum pokus to the terrifiers of your poem, writ in pas de deux— dirge to dance in box steps to. And from everything a forgettable speed, and from everything else, straining eyes aimed for the hay fields. Shaded from the sun by branded caps (ranch brand, ranch hand) with curved bills, under which a wasted wickedness waits. From things to come a rapture of nothing. From Jacobs ladder, memories of angels climb down into baskets headed for hell—and two homunculus, charged to stabilize the ladder’s feet—laugh like their all alone down there. The little fucks. Because there are always what ifs, and we our teething on them there.
O to get a halleluiah now. Just one word from the empty oar lock.
letter to snap shut
Dear he who makes what’s fit to print;
a dare the size of grow & grist(s);
Our present day is rather disputatious; & there go
the things I didn’t get to: go my love affairs;
how hierarchy birds clean through afternoons, awash-ed [& shed]
in the blood of lamps [hundred watt] light coming
from tiny cameras on primetime dollarbills; everywhere
you look: what wingspan! How lovely, deeper, water;
is our fit verb all monikered and meandering.
Don’t look now, someone doesn’t agree with me;
And is it also me? Why, let’s make a show of it!
Please champions, launch your rocking chairs, and please
let me tell you about my fever as you rock rest.
This race is very hard without a web of sleeves.
Faintly I protect the voluptuously detailed, for you
so I can cram the fringe of freight with (what):
tenacious hivery. Such is the again & again: with us:
sincerely yours; he who holds the prize too close.
Three part fantasy of maps
“—wonder distraction”
A map of the world is situated
in the various shape you were raised in (up-brought
& tells you) the ways you are gone when you want;
a map of the world (too much)
reminds you of everything
you learned watching (memorizing) parades
of hammer & crane operators
& the priests who architected the shape of the map;
(line, color, code) with [what was lying around] this:
a necessity the shape dictates; revealed not invented.
A map of the world is unrecognizable
flaunting its thin black name; a round; flaunting
it’s a thin black game; it wonders
with your eyes—tries to correct its keys
with tender cornertips; drawing away until
it sees a future & maps it back to you.
“this is the road, walk on it”
We do not own our mouths outright.
Sometimes you are only saying
until someone hears you. The nerve
of sleep mumblings; sound
improved on self;
permission granted; we kissing back
the wet mouth kissing ours; how the body
translates reasoning behind wrongs; in mouths
there are species of decay and grief; none other;
(saying said) we swallow because;
the corner of the mouth belongs to the corner
of the mind; taken aback; the creases
and valleys of the lip skin fold
like failed countries; we whisper when;
fortune doesn’t speak the way; we say it does
when we win fighting, when we win
back our original thought — which it was;
the tongue makes memory of salt and lies.
Our mouth is so urgent, it walks on
the road of our faces; wanders off.
say when (there is nothing)
Like now. Nothing. Things are things.
Behold, subsuming nightmare; a late breeze
slips through night’s make believe window.
Only an hour
until Fools Day. The lines I was reading
lain down, not flat; the cover flaps slightly; slight.
I feel sorry a little shiver.
Now not to quit. Time is a secret.
The ultimate one. Now not to notice, time-wise;
otherwise, you would be happy.
These marks ground as they are made, but push you
off cliffs of air when read; don’t tell me
I have to drag out my toolbelt (please)
of my trophies of weapons; or have
to tell you one more time;
how long have I been using them?
The question is a scar.
I’ve asked about this since I was fifty-
five years old—not long after birth,
and then the graduation from third to pay grade;
a hundred times (yes). Pay-as-you-go lessons
were a favorite then; was my stock answer
to visiting kin who bent in half to me
to inquire, “what is your favorite subject?”
I have posted this sign on every small business
venture I have not fructified. I have completed
so many change of address forms by now.
And now it is catching up with me.
To survive this homelessness
I must abscond with a name
for each separate loss.
Note:
“Three part fantasy of maps”: “This is the road, walk on it” is a line from Kate Greenstreet.
