The Blue Door
In memory, Kenward Elmslie
1
The obligatory cancels its strophe. Let me get a grip,
and begin in this other patch where the air is.
Am I among the vanishing? How does it feel?
As if turning, as if falling, as if coming
unstuck from the body’s inconvenience?
Too many questions spoil the poem.
The poem-as-poem cannot reply.
Which is why we need more voices, even
as we know what happens when
there are more voices. Noise, argument, rupture.
Why not a single voice, one that
represents everyone? Poem? Are you listening?
A crucible of dalliance supersedes Goldilocks
and all other pending catastrophes
angling toward power. As if on the last
day you could recall power.
If only the field could retract
into a new beginning, intact, complex,
the geography of the many
seeding the plural world with accord,
good replicating good; evil,
singular, kept to its barren agenda.
Prayers and wishes could then speed
our recovery from the uninhabitable
scald of the venal market.
Not to be hysterical or polemical. Not to
confuse personal anxiety with the future.
I was once at the Stray Dog Cabaret, once in
unlit neighborhoods where sexy initiatives
were underway, awaiting Jim Jarmusch.
Clubs, bars, sudden upswept encounters
with the privileged poor. Dancing with the stars.
Meanwhile.
Meanwhile, another beginning in another district.
I am seeing the headlights of an oncoming
vehicle; I am seeing the filmic snow.
O, and I am stepping into the new day
like a doe among bucks, a girl in sequins.
I am trying not to count lovers, or shoes.
The shoes
gather, episodic, in twos.
There are no agents,
no inscriptions,
as the story flows down into a rescinded pile.
I have come to fear the punctuated day.
I have come to wish I had done things differently,
never to have begun with such sad disclosures.
Absent the stanza, the difficult vocabulary,
wandering barefoot along an avenue,
before these piles, these sticks,
the distant lump of dark vestigial matter
and skittering sounds from under the floor
lasting until dawn, and so
looking outward, where skies assemble
their beautiful reconnaissance
traveling, as if beckoning, as if to include.
2
There are countless children wandering.
Singles and plurals, one shoe, many children
or one child, many shoes. These
discrepancies confuse the grammatical
police; they do not know what to arrest.
Please speak carefully, as this is a vote,
and whether or not you have shoes
you need to say, to choose
whether or not. What undergirds
these words? What might be found?
A frugal sandal or the dazzling
technicolor magic
of the good witch’s
rubies? Everyone is after ruby slippers.
We might sort through the archive of sneakers,
the branded stores; we might look
at the feet of strangers, shod in tar and
mildew, mud and blood, the goo
trammeled underfoot, like history.
The southern sky has turned peachy.
I would like to wear it out tomorrow
as a slip. And so slip
through the hole in the sky
into the azure assembly, the tiered swerve
from universe to universe, in my new attire
looking for a mate, or moonstruck
in the glitter of heaven. No guns allowed.
If you listen carefully, you can hear the thrum
of insomniac wings pulsating between episodes of cloud.
In this atmosphere, nothing is shut,
and so motion is the rule, motion without time,
this time, our time, our habit of counting up
and counting down, speaking in numbers
as if they were thought. In the distance I hear
the sound of a creature being slain by another
creature. The beings I love are creatures.
Is writing a way of stalling for time,
to delay the tasks in the next room,
dishes and clothes, books and papers,
the pile of shoes on the floor, the floor,
the rugs, the drawer
chaotic with nails and hooks and small tools?
Poem is too busy to answer.
Words are like small magnets,
pulling other words toward them, one by one,
so the singles gather and as they gather
they attest to an alignment that will become
meaning. What was it you said about naming?
It makes a way between unbeing and being,
the definite flowing into the circulating infinite,
the blue door opening the night sky.
Notes:
This piece is part of the portfolio “How It Continues to Astonish: The Poetry of Ann Lauterbach.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the March 2023 issue. All poems are from Door by Ann Lauterbach, published by Penguin, and printed here with the permission of the author.
Source: Poetry (March 2023)