Free Or to Begin Again by Ann Lauterbach

miraculous scale of the small nouns,
their mischief and potential.
Auden imagining war at a sidewalk café.
Oppen staring into the face of a stranger,
into the face of his beloved Mary.
We want to be here.
I was thinking of table settings: folded napkins,
polished ware, sparkling glasses.
And the prayer? What was the prayer?
What if everything had slowed
and she had chosen to wait, to forget her chore.
There were, I recall, ripples of violence
that caught on twigs and snapped wires.
Words were spoken from too far away to be heard.
There was a blind spot, a stained cloth. The end.
5.
    Or to begin again
suspended above the habitat, bees
dying in their boxes, salmon
desiccated in their nets, flight on flight,
origin marked by tracks in mud
and the river newly revealed
through naked bark
like a silver coin skipped across time
the migrations of time
the small noun time.
The world fallen from its skin
into the airy wild, abode of infinite
contraction, this in which it is, adhering.
A swarm and a nub, tumbleweed shadowed on ice.
The facts encroaching on intimate constraint.
These could be a hand, a voice. The end.
6.
    Or to begin again
an accident disperses the law. Thrown there,
there. Less than forgotten
in the usual ditch of leaves, weeds, caps,
a massive gold afloat in the autumnal sky.
At whose approval? The call stuffed in a sock?
The faces of the war dead in a signature farewell:
boy, boy, boy, girl, boy, boy, girl,
picturing evidence, picturing silence,
and the chorus ready to respond: holy, holy, holy,
to awaken the dead but not in the language of the dead.
Perhaps a finite contraction,
the child practicing to fly overhead, to drop the bag
on the dusty road below, to watch it spill into flames from on
high, from a mobile perch
cruising through its episodes of grief. The end.
7.
    Or to begin again
some got lucky, came rushing
toward the giant appeasement of the given.
Singing along with the anthem
they distributed coupons to the rest
to redeem, solace for those who do not
begin but stay back in the infrastructure
of the singular: what you said, what I said, before
the fact. Were we to be among those to be counted
one by one, like days? Greeted by our host?
In which language? And what were we meant to
carry away, down the road a bit, into the rest?
Light strays across the dry grasses.
The arm lifts, the head turns.
A gathering, an image, a dispersal
in whichever order. The end.
8.
    Or to begin again: now now
birdlike, repeated,
the noise of nearness,
yet without either body or mouth.
In the mind’s eye, a wall
painted robin’s egg blue
behind Paul Klee’s dirty yellow circus.
Nothing noticed, nothing gained.
A clown on his head, a dog, a ball.
And yet the acquiescent rain,
and yet the passage
of a massive chant
through the fictive pilings of a cage.
Comest thou now? Comest thou now?
Repeated, birdlike, from over there.
Look up and then look away. The end.
9.
    Or to begin again: virtuous moon
appears to be taking a star for a walk; I
cannot see a leash, but the star
is obedient. Together they traverse
the night sky. It is winter
and the ground below is a dull shell.
The secular ghost is chastised
in its moody camp; it fears ice
as it fears the dawn when the moon
will have vanished, star in tow.
It knows when things begin to melt
there will be a forgetting and, in the wan face
of the beloved, the stigma of desire.
Fuck desire, says the ghost, only
no one can hear and so no one can answer.
Fuck desire, it repeats, birdlike, at dawn. The end.
10.
    Or to begin again: a gift is in the offing.
Something a sparrow might drop
on its way, something sent
across the boundaries of time.
Why is the deck at a tilt
so that the day and its objects
might slip off the edge? The boy
with the fiddle, his
dark brows flat, eyes recessed
into the harbor of play:
four strings, taut bow, the arc
of elaborations, note by note, his wrist
traversing their wake.
The day has its spelling, the night also.
Tell me what she heard in the