Eclipse with Object
There is a spectacle and something is added to history.
It has as its object an indiscretion: old age, a
gun, the prevention of sleep.
I am placed in its stead
and the requisite shadow is yours.
It casts across me, a violent coat.
It seems I fit into its sleeve.
So the body wanders.
Sometime it goes where light does not reach.
You recall how they moved in the moon dust? Hop, hop.
What they said to us from that distance was stupid.
They did not say I love you for example.
The spectacle has been placed in my room.
Can you hear its episode trailing,
pretending to be a thing with variegated wings?
Do you know the name of this thing?
It is a rubbing from an image.
The subject of the image is that which trespasses.
You are invited to watch. The body
in complete dark casting nothing back.
The thing turns and flicks and opens.
Copyright Credit: Ann Lauterbach, “Eclipse with Object” from And For Example. Copyright © 1994 by Ann Lauterbach. Reprinted with the permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: If In Time: Selected Poems, 1975-2000 (Penguin Books, 2001)