Ann Lauterbach

1.

I have turned my back on the mountains. Let the sun have them.

Let the sun have the river as well, I am done with it.

I am done with the sun and the mountains and the river.

Now I will stare at the spines of books.

At the spines, and the hinges, and the knobs.

The spines of books hold a chorus

singing from the dead to the living,

and from the living back to the dead.

I was about to reread The House of Mirth

but then recalled that we read it aloud to each other,

chapter by chapter, in bed. The sun

is setting behind my back. Behind

the knobs are secrets. I will

tell about them another time. The files are

useful; neither fully open nor shut.

I was speaking to a young man about

the ineffable. He seemed to want to find a way

to say it. I said the nature of

the ineffable is the unsayable.

The spines’ address is inward and outward,

the once and never more recurring, binding

there into here, like the quick shadow of that bird.

2.

The story anticipates its assembly

under a punitive moon.

Remember me. Was that a question?

Hard to say. And don’t look up.

Questions burden us

toward landscapes of old-growth trees

and the terror of the kill. Hi, it’s me again,

I had a dream in which things

happened that do not and will not

in real life. I look up into

the disobedient figure of the real

and resent its sentence.

I am not a platform. The body

foresees its future, playing a certain tune

aside or beside the point

of beautiful unfolding. Belonging, yes, but

to whom or to what? I apologize. I looked up

at the eternally weeping willow.

Widow? Window? I can’t tell in this dark.

I said, There are fewer pills than there should be.

He said, A robot counts them.

My earlobe is torn. Can it be mended?

Probably, but by whom and how?

A needle and thread? A robot? Glue?

Have you noticed things in general seem torn?

Can they be mended? By what or whom?

I sometimes wish I could start again

in that other field with the magenta sky.

What to do with these ashes? What

to play when everyone is quiet and fearful?

Play some tunes from the border. Some

lyrics from the distant past of another country,

a place where no one knows the word robot.

The names are scented but blurry; they fall

down a mercantile ravine, awash with

meaning and the equations of logic

ripped from documents and thrown overboard.

The children are delighted; they cannot read.

They love the mighty mud and the relic tin cans.

What is that? they ask, staring at a rusty R.

It’s the beginning of something that ended long ago.

Over here the circle theme continues

without a clock, uncountable

and unmarked despite a pouring sound,

despite slight lesions in the rock.

A hand is waving, silently, from under

cover of cloud we said was blanketing

the sky, and so, indeed, the sky is blank

but for a reverie of reach and touch;

the ancient, fingered dark.

The word I was trying to recall is fungible

but it doesn’t mean what I had thought,

so now I need to trade it for

another, one that means porous, means

mutable, means a shadow can pass through

unnoticed, means you turn and nothing

before comes after, nothing takes hold.