Free Hum by Ann Lauterbach Page B

spitting crumbs
                tit for tat    avarice of an already X-rated
                                schedule
                                personal story told at dinner among
                                                                 strangers.
    Memory comes also
    came along with
    youthful impertinence
    as of a boy sitting on a grave singing his
one two threes
    shot through with doubt.
    Science came along only to aid method’s imperative
    those cruel and those careful
                        scribbles, tears
                             hours
         hunky-dory tryst   later a refrain   too easily stated
                          habitats of real time as opposed to
                                     routine
                  the boy turns to tell his secret—
                      Hamlet’s affliction
                              sweet or imagined now
                                                                as sweet.

FRAGMENT (AUGUST)
    Look to turn more quickly toward   it was fetched   a remembrance
    and the pervasive hinge
    a salutation    thunder, or betrayal, the lesser gods
      as uneasy as the greater, their saga inconclusive, their minds
        unmade up.
    The greens hung
             lofty, low—
    It was not a city to be known by heart.
    It was not a small town.
    The sea was elsewhere, crashing up against dunes.
    It was merely an afternoon
                    contaminated on either side—

HARMONY
    Truculent thing
    why missing from these premises?
    Stuck in abstraction, in the coiled hand?
    Why feeble as you jog along the streets?
    Why almost touching?
    Are you Socrates, to be written
    into the season of robins and suicide?
    Is your pose characteristic?
    Did you inherit the magenta ring
    or the trees’ wild seizure,
    the rival architect’s house
    hardly built but shining?
    Toddler call, at variance with icons,
    are you indifferent to sorrow?
    Relic of mismanaged risk
    newly made, are you,
    have you already been forgiven?

COUNTRY LIFE
    And lived differently, in a crude cul-de-sac,
    with the mangy fox and his id
    a clown. Another old horse, this one
    made from plastic and wire, trudged out
    to find a mare, not aware that war was immanent
    and he would be asked about his expenditures
    in the star-cast anthem of restitution. The kids were
    out of school and on their motors, tearing through the brush,
    hell-bent on speed, ignoring the gold birds and their song.
    They would never ask who the girl is in the poem, the one in which
    Stevens intones a greater mystery, they would not want to know
    about mystery. They would want to ride until they won.
    And the old clown would want to swoon.
    Desire comes and goes and comes,
    as if wings on a stem in late summer. The wind came
    pretending to be spirit, its largesse vaulting day
    and leaving twigs scattered on the grass. That was a good sign,
    in a time without signs. It was hard to say, given that no one
    read signs any more, except Children At Play and
    Stop The Plant. The train was famously remote, and beautiful in its
    roar along the river’s edge, hooting and dragging its hoot through air.
    And still the issues arose urgently, unlike the night, ever calm.

OPPEN’S WAY
    A small table is not a vacancy.
    I promise to avoid quotation.
    Look what you have started.
    Is there another word for Patrick?
    But she is singing again!
    How much was the farm in Vermont?
    To the right is a landscape in Iceland.
    My grandfather’s ketch was called
Hawkbells.
    The forsythia screams on the hill.
    I am trying to drink more water.
    I see the bell but only by looking up.
    Now everything is wet.
    If I change my ways