Free Hum by Ann Lauterbach Page A

displacement
               the arc of the bridge has collapsed
               things remain under their masks
               there is neither the one nor the other with whom
               to flirt. This is what occurs, less than a horizon
    tea leaves berserk in the global riverbed
    Things drip.
    4.
    Another day’s scansion
                    
secretly at work in the massive affiliation
    could focus
    on an opening: icons appear for each thing:
atlas, bird, cup.
    Look up at the shape of a rotunda
    humped high above the shore.
    I was at the periphery all this time
                     
all during this time I was at the periphery
    notes fell through the percussive zeal
             even as rose petals were strewn on the loading dock
                     and the bride kissed the groom
                         under their parasol
        the issue of kids the lily project
            mechanics of turbulence in the spheres
              
and the bleak continuum of a repeated phrase sung across the alley.
    Clandestine erasures fortify our trivia, so this sheen, this look,
    floats over rhetoric, beckoning small retrievals
                 onto which we might paste yet another history
                        
might as well.

LOGISTICS
    What are we to know? Inward, old seagull, cut,
    abrasive magic and its clues. List
    comes from the nearly invisible to announce
    but she, in her museum of rhymes, finds death
    among her things: inward, old seagull, and the numbers
    cut out and the letters cut out.
    There was a gathering. It was like a story, but not.
    It was like another room in which Satie
    was underlined in red, whose correction is
    sate. So she might have been sated, in her notes,
    her musical likeness, her
    resistance. They were affiliated. That would be one
    sentence to know.
    But it would be trouble
    when life depended on it.
    If life depends on it. Life depends on it.
    In noise, the mother said,
cut it out!
    wanting order and silence. But the mother was all
    disorder and her nights were the noise of nights.

UNTITLED WITH MOON
    What she sees are reinforcements from the dream
    wherein the cat
    comes out from under a flimsy wall
    attached to its mother.
    Better to lie down on the floor
    and watch the canopy sway,
    the logics of cloud tinker with light.
    Tomorrow all stories will be abridged.
    The old men will talk of creatures
    bedazzled by dawn, the trick of dawn,
    things unknown to anyone,
    feuds and love confided by
    uncle to girl when he feels the urge
    to tell. Desire
    will return, bounding or lancing down
    from the scant universe, causing
    burns and antennae,
    blisters of air. The pilgrims will move on
    into the funnel
    cooled on the water by the moon’s breath.
    There is only one way down to the river, at least from here.

SEEN, OVERHEARD
    To stay among shifts
    to fall out  beyond tools of trade
         beyond friendship’s replicas
                her face turned
                his face
            among these
    migrating references
                   telephoto lens and
                       offered spot
                       ideal before murder
                       ideal before the spoken
                                      ideal before sport.
    Yet the second galaxy is hazy to the naked eye
                   bird blue
                      to the eye up close    near the ground
                                                           near change.
    Equation drowns from the corner
    of an odd sensation
    without a singular
and,
without addendum
    so that
    to live among these
    to establish a plural
    to race out from advice    a girl