IF IN TIME
Selected Poems 1975-2000

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By ANN LAUTERBACH

PENGUIN POETS
Penguin Group

Copyright © 2001 Ann Lauterbach. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-14-058930-9

THE CALL (1997-2000).................................................1
    Template.........................................................3
    September Song...................................................5
    Typography.......................................................7
    Diorama of the Uninhabited Yes...................................8
    Walk............................................................10
    Legacy..........................................................13
    New Brooms......................................................16
    Winter Strawberries.............................................18
    Narcolepsy......................................................19
    The Call........................................................21
    The Same Moon...................................................24
    Splendor........................................................26
    Snow............................................................28
    Interleavings (Paul Celan)......................................31
    A Novelist Speaks (Don DeLillo).................................32
    Invoice.........................................................34
    C Is Forgiving..................................................36
    Frayed Edges....................................................37
    Freesia Errata Slip.............................................43
from ON A STAIR (1996)..............................................45
    Invocation......................................................47
    On (Word).......................................................48
    On (Thing)......................................................49
    On (Dream)......................................................50
    A Clown, Some Colors, A Doll, Her Stories, A Song, A
    Moonlit Cove....................................................51
    Nocturnal Reel..................................................65
    A Valentine for Tomorrow........................................68
    Staircase.......................................................71
    Daylight Savings Time...........................................72
    Blake's Lagoon..................................................74
    Night Barrier...................................................77
    Poise on Row....................................................80
    Sequence with Dream Objects in Real Time........................82
    Free Fall.......................................................85
    And the Question Of.............................................87
    Poem with Last Line from Epictetus..............................90
from AND FOR EXAMPLE (1994).........................................91
    The Prior.......................................................93
    Rancor of the Empirical.........................................96
    The Untelling...................................................97
    Eclipse with Object.............................................99
    from For Example...............................................100
        Stepping Out...............................................100
        Tangled Reliquary..........................................106
        Lost Section...............................................110
        Song of the Already Sung...................................114
        Of the Fire................................................119
        And the Fire Spread........................................124
    Seven Songs for Joe............................................131
    Missing Ages...................................................137
    Harm's Way, Arm's Reach........................................140
    Ashes, Ashes (Robert Ryman, Susan Crile).......................143
    In the Museum of the Word (Henri Matisse)......................147
    When Color Disappoints (Joseph Beuys)..........................152
from CLAMOR (1991).................................................157
    Tuscan Visit (Simone Martini)..................................159
    Gesture and Flight.............................................162
    The French Girl................................................166
    Tribe (Stamina of the Unseen)..................................168
    Clamor.........................................................170
    Boy Sleeping...................................................172
    Of the Meadow..................................................174
    How Things Bear Their Telling..................................176
    Local Branch...................................................179
    Prom in Toledo Night...........................................180
    Remorse of the Depicted........................................190
    Lakeview Diner.................................................191
    Not That It Could Be Finished..................................192
    Annotation.....................................................193
    After the Storm................................................194
    Report.........................................................195
    Tock...........................................................196
from BEFORE RECOLLECTION (1987)....................................197
    Subject to Change..............................................199
    The Vanquished.................................................200
    Poem for Margrit, for Frida....................................201
    Closing Hours..................................................202
    Psyche's Dream.................................................203
    Still..........................................................204
    Saint Lucia....................................................205
    Holding Air....................................................208
    As Far As the Eye Can See......................................209
    Monody.........................................................210
    Naming the House...............................................211
    Landscape with Vase............................................212
    Carousel.......................................................213
    Before Recollection............................................215
    Medieval Evening...............................................216
    Lake of Isles..................................................217
    Topaz..........................................................218
    Path...........................................................219
    Coastal........................................................220
    Aperture.......................................................221
    Vernal Elegy...................................................222
    A Simple Service...............................................223
    The Walled Palace..............................................224
    Narrow Margins.................................................225
    Later That Evening.............................................226
from MANY TIMES, BUT THEN (1979)...................................227
    A Visit to the Country.........................................229
    Gramercy Park Evening..........................................230
    Then Suddenly..................................................231
    Along the Way..................................................232
    Winter Sky.....................................................233
    True and False Green...........................................234
    The White Sequence.............................................235
    Configuration of One...........................................238
    Gray Morning...................................................239
    Poem...........................................................240
    Romance........................................................241
    As It Turns Out................................................242
    The Day After..................................................243
    Last Night It Rained...........................................244
    Standing at a Distance.........................................245
    And So.........................................................246
    East River Barge...............................................247
    Reynolda Gardens...............................................248
    Country Evenings...............................................249
    After All......................................................250
    The Relinquished...............................................251
    Second Descent: 1975...........................................252
    Quotations from Reality........................................253

Chapter One

    TEMPLATE

An exhausted prostitute sits on a white puritanical bed
small in her dress, her eyes orientally sad.
In the window, the green light
of a pond gives order to the universe
although the male child, nine, asks
what is that? Knowing
bed, dress, sad, window, green and light,
having some notion of the pond,
not inquisitive about the universe because he
knows that too (it is where he is)
what he asks
of the scene is the doll.

A garden is an idea.
It is not plants flourishing in good soil,
not the edible dream, not
mildew in the cusps of mulch, not
Celtic glory—Cornwall, the Isle of Man,
the Ulster ballads

                    sad tunes
of the blue-eyed musician

(the sky keeps returning to the pond

(when I was a girl, there was

a garden

there were steps
these steps went down

into magic
as in a story

where what is is
changed by language)

singing a garden is an idea.

             And the soloist's avidity, her song
before the morning din: trucks, warplanes, pickaxe,
churning air into lament and dust, as if waking
into the final cause

the soloist, transcribing

these findings, is
puerile without history which is
also an idea.

to Henry GC, later

    SEPTEMBER SONG

But we cantilevered
across the ruins
                         love in Lagos Hollywood
                                  but we
           photographed radiant
           in suits
                                 but we
                            clasping the bright entitlement of things

Illusion of quilts, including the barn door and the rake
to the extent that birds are outside, and all the tricks of film—
magic of space caught as dots, two
installed as particulars close to each other, their intimacy
achieved by the practice of something manipulated
so that it is almost, but not quite, real.

  To work quietly, seriously, productively
           yellow hinges
isolated from drift
             companions in patience, lost
                    in the stars.

The virulence of the age surrounded a small thicket of romance.
The people, bagged in rain,
fell up and up
into the basket-weave sky.
Somewhat like this, the mechanism of the day
thwarted our progress, so we spilled out
bereft of purpose. Fist of red leaves; a mild gray wind.
These old-fashioned contingencies shamed us
but the new had no agenda, no secret plan or past.
A young girl traveled swiftly over long grass into the inquisitive mode:
Have you got a television? Where are your children?
She seemed to understand the value of fruition
and the cost of abstention. Cartooned in the distance
she ran as fast as she could, hands crowded
with coins borrowed for keeps.
The old enemies
began to encroach, even as we sat on a roof
across from the crenellated tower
and watched a toy ball
fall into a drain as the day
swerved up a brick wall into night's dump.

    TYPOGRAPHY

Stalled at a lectern, a habit or price.
Snow fill and blur and the sidelong currents
from no direction, the direction of news
spun into an appeal
for the evident to withstand the friction of use.
The incentive of a backward glance
improvised the hour so as not to punish
its advent, in which a child first emerges
and a woman makes a reservation on a train.
These pop from the calendar like songs.
The girl in pearly shoes
knows to please
                    which is how
she begins to move
in the atmosphere of the heaping snow
among discontinued genes anonymously strewn.
Things she can and cannot do.
The scheme pulls apart
but nothing spills
except an arsenal of thinnest lines
on an unopened note, fluid
below the fledgling ice, not yet wholly dissolved.
Certain acuities float slowly off the bridge.
These she calls derision flare, reflected apex,
ninth plunder, depending on the wind, its correction as fate.
But nobody, in the sapphire spray, notices.
What are we to call the thing
that pulses along but does not connect, a
mute heart? And what about the person
who is guided away from us, what to call her?
Snow ruins the echo of its fall. You cannot hear
the small dust or liquid elicited,
near as can be, along the eyelid of time.
How pretty she looks under the covers
while stamina fails. Stamina is this world plus another.

    DIORAMA OF THE UNINHABITED YES

And here, an exaggerated arc
—see
how its grin exceeds the joke—
and the featherweight drama
                                               liability of the newly wet
                              swelling the planks

The list, old among numbers, could be six, seven,
among these it could be
ideology skulking at the corner of an age
star-struck, emulating, singing along with the tune
that smell of sweet perfume
                              among numbers, filtered into the humid
                                     high summer air
                           mouth open, lips in sync,
and the question comes up
dropped into the street below—

It could be Caravaggio
or the fleshy belief he inscribed,
dense filiation of desire, and so
a mythic arrangement is in order here, among these numbers,
a story decision on the back lot. So he comes toward her and says

would you have a look at this script?
could you cut my hair?
would you mind lowering the shade?

The answer The direction of the first bed The task

And now look, far
is near, next door is another century
whose shape reconfigures the topography of care.
It seems possible to notice a harem
gathering around the stump, wearing boas
and slacks, whispering into the dust.
Shall we address their dilemma?

The anticipated part is only part of the assignment,
part two is the repeated motif of law.
The nurse said be prepared, strip.
And we thought, given this premise, that she had seen
the thing slain and the unshared part dealt out among strangers,
those in the park, those in a boat, a few wandering across a bridge.
But this never happens in the city,
only usual begetting as the slant bends into a curl,
the curl a parenthetical remark or eyelash on the pillow of dawn.
Riots in the capital.
Europe destroyed under its canopy of culture.
This moves across the threshold into that
because the wind's fitful economy
parts only debris, laying claim to the moment
as if it were a lucky number pulled from a hat.

    WALK

Mistakenly on the other side's side: walking along.
Thinking this must be change, this discomfort.
Walking as on an island, the mausoleum across the yard.
Thus: a span, uncluttered, available: the dark.
The dark yard's discomfort, the breeze withheld.
Picturing and then being the picture, the still.
A red tugboat trolling, near the dam.
The dramatist walking by the taxi. No one waves.
Here we accumulate. One, two, among.

There were, of course, too many stories yoked to the original, too many
collisions under the scaffold. What we thought about seeped back under
the foundation, to become itself a kind of mud, luminous at night, during
the quiet night ride. We were in the uncomfortable stage, the eighth
month, its enormity a kind of pathos, the garden bloated beyond enchantment.
Over there, across the bridge, another group gathered, spying
on the generations, summing them up. Right, they attested, sure enough.
Nobody had time to vote, and those that did, did for reasons only the
Op-Ed understood.

They were testing our right to continue.
We pretended to know.

But then there was the uncontaminated filigree of skin, youthful through
an extra pair of glasses, classically wide-eyed, the world as yet undiminished
by the burden of its authors. That old hymn, remember? Among the
disenfranchised nothing stirred, and the silt went easily over the new spillway,
and the moon extended her rights of passage down into the arroyo.

Not belonging was a kind of errancy, a bluff seen by others as
refusal without implications.

In the room there were small movable tables.
In the room there was a pair of shoes.
In the room there was a book on the floor.
In the room certain things were missing.
In the room there were no mirrors.

The radio's episodic dial.
Bourgeois affinities of the newly polished leather.
The writer-in-exile speaks candidly to the reporter, eating nuts.
Modernism ends.
In the room music went on.
In the room a table was replaced; it was not a museum.
A flag fell across a stamp.
Unpleasant expenditures, body odors, tears.
New regulations undoing privacy.

Saturday. Lake Committee meeting.
Call from Martin.
Second call from Martin, no number.
Joan's scent in the hallway.
Rick's unhappiness with what he wrote.
Second book received with compliments of the author on a printed card.
Torrential rain.
First parking ticket.
Call from David.
Call from another David.
Call from Thomas. Full moon.
Small yellow pill. Small red pill.
Note from Elaine mentioning J. Crew.
Refusal to stay in room 205.
Aggressive male child in the park.
Mary Ann quotes René Char.
Idea of Prose.
George and Mary sailing. Sincerity and sailing, a remark.
Lilacs.
Lost Wax. Cookery.
Genius as economy without waste.
Pictures without captions.
Pictures of persons without names.

To excerpt the ordinary from splendor, the affluent cloister,
trapped in a small luminous box
in which everyone knows everyone else.
Could drop some names from the glossary,
delete a few consummations while
dressed in fatigues, the fatigue of need, the accepted norm,
sorrow and reality, the loved person dying, the leaves
lapsed, drawn forward
with autumn's litany of perishables:
book bags, shirts without monograms,
the if-then date.
Is it wise to abstain?
Such is the city's grail
that the hum is expansive, shorn
from prevailing silence and entrails of light.
Crave thee this dialogue? This touch?
Is an allegory of—
Let's walk a little into it.
David says that generation had something we lack,
a calm mind. David says
perhaps only those from another country
can combine the rhetoric of feeling with

I have forgotten the rest.

    LEGACY

    1.

I am thinking again of drab
fly cycles
roof mumbling harmony
up in attics beyond deliberation I am
stunned (young man, you
have ruined this phase (I am thinking
the window is rotted and the flies are crafting their music
under a single nude (seen
thither and yon
in as many particulars:
the alert dust, the carefree bonanza
of a city (waiting in the dark
by the side of everything
paused under a shaft
little pool of blood on the curb
pink discrepancy of what we imagined
was terror: then
going on into the hills beyond the mall's crude angles
road stretched
counting the characters
not yet proven, not sold, not released
into what we had seen: old visitor, hawk,
I am waving good-bye.

    2.

Shadow range
ekphrastic renovation of a spoon

without shelter
the thing delighted is kept

to follow the once
that, once said, was

inscribed on the tongue
to ask from the margin

will you come
to the incident's call

open the blinds
spill sun in his mouth

hope's flagrant shine
cast back to its arbor

stain on the dress
new twenty-dollar bill

malleable space
on a page of trials

clairvoyant current
under the paved

clues to the meaning
in the feathers of slang

passing a note
from fever to ash

    3.

    Yes and here

    distributed as acronyms for praise, small

    attributes

    here

all along the way, as if marshaled,
testimony calibrated under the horn
so that we had seen in a leaf the Spartan vagary of time,
its credentials,
         here
lasting under the last
permission sought, its style
coming around

as a decision to stay
one or three days
         here
not as the recuperating genius of an age
not as the swooning female
not as the hieroglyph bomb

but ask who is here, who speaking—
Mr. Predictable Rage & Ms. Predictable Doubt
dance the Predictable Rag.

    4.

Excessive and volatile, from which all detail is omitted.
Film me in costume. I want to be a soldier.
We went to the local store in search of thread.
That is all I recall of childhood.

    NEW BROOMS

Of representation (frame)
from one to another (use)
between the articulation (space)
of language (tree)
of clarity by means of (intent)
of humans (speech)
on the contrary (response)
with itself, in its own density (earth)
for it is not (image)
from the first to the second (wave)
seizes upon (law)
within the other (us)
without those of (tradition)
point by point (nature)
of or to (the same)

and so on into a possible good
the waxed carnation's cribbed flounce
shade distinctly wound among new brooms
panache of the ever-tan September

And so what is said is at an angle

architectural

over the floor from which the soliloquy drafts
        upwards, as if restitution
             could be a chant surrounding disaster.

Bruise on the arm lingers in absentia.
Buzz saw in the alley.

Speech, oracle of intention, dissolves
into the sea's remission
as up through an imperfect net comes another exaltation.

    2.

Some here twitch along a heading, out
out, and came thou back along the periphery,
shroud tracked, foregathered,
tune integrating chorale
tautly drawn into rainspit, down
through the breaking mirror's reminiscent shield, bethou
said the maiden, bethou said the monk.
Not yet, said the bird, elongating distance,
high among pines and pale rock.
But had we spoken of the quarry?
Or were we in a room, video-taped, among dry towels
and the humid inquisition of the crowd?
We were in the crowd, "you and I" "he and she" and so
transpired over its edge into
bodily harm: an eye for a hand, some mantra of war.
The stipulating crew began to assert its origins
and what pale and what golden
shimmied into paradox, whittling the streets with monograms,
the walls with cool but generative dust.
The pictures came back from their instants.
A genetic stroke of luck is not to have this receptor.
Yet another instruction, one we still cannot read.

to Thomas Dumm

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