Or to Begin Again (11 page)

Or to begin again—still no sign
in the field of negation.
All appears to be ordinary.
Seabirds depicted above the sea,
the pretty couple dancing,
the buzzing saw,
evening clouds assembled, mountains dark.
Yes, but the page is not blank.
Yes, but the sun's pallor
consumes as it rolls
across the heavens, dragging
the head of the beheaded despot,
the embattled fishermen
combing the sea with nets,
the girl with a dove in her suitcase.
I had wanted to count the steps. The end.

Or to begin again having quoted, inscribed,
having changed a few words
along the way, a gesture toward
the gaps between is not, is, is not.
Eve gives me a map traced on thin paper
with a red dot. The boys walk along the road,
their hoods up, their speech riddled.
The red dot is where they were headed
in the year of the snake. We decided
against perfection. We said
perfection is a morbid
judgment against the living.
The girl with red hair was imperfect.
They did not come with only a suitcase on a boat,
Eve said. The Dutch, I said, made paintings
of nature arranged as perfect death. The end.

Or to begin again: thisness abbreviated:
margins, earshot. Have no herald, no scope
under such bearings, only an instruction
to carry on under the new doctrine's law.
A friend is known to speak
about the difficulty of understanding.
Could he climb higher to see better
as from the distant star
occluded beyond ever knowing?
Now obey this.
The steps lead nowhere, so only
the small bird, hiding under boughs, escapes
the mirage of escape.
Fidelity ruptures at the core
over there, where he hurled
his oath at the corpse of belonging. The end.

Or to begin again: lavish permission,
ribbons placed back in their bag,
pulled through the sleeves
of the prisoner's coat, the suicide's
gun. The Arab men
are playing backgammon in the courtyard.
The preacher's voice fills the chapel
with iconographies of faith.
Our tears turn to ice
and the mourners stop along the path,
informal now, unrestrained, makeshift.
So that with nothing held back we sigh,
beyond time, for that green pasture where time
stands still
. Does not. Does. Go back
before the beginning, before
a promise was made. The end.

Or to begin again: chronicle of thaw
and the sitting hawk
and the tilting stones.
The place has become
a saturated edge
moving quickly along the road
up over the arc of bridge, flag, sun,
and the hanging man. Fact
dissolves into fact, proximate to
the slowest economy, the most forbidden dream.
The girl enters knowledge.
You can see her on the trail
of the smallest bug, the most inglorious weed.
We join her in the aftermath of promise
where she is studying the tides.
World without image dilates. The end.

Way over in the particularities of evening
gold touches the back of her neck. It spawns
in a zone of supposition and indirection.
Auden imagining war at a sidewalk café.
Origin marked by tracks in mud.
At whose approval? The call stuffed in a sock?
Begin but stay back in the infrastructure
nothing noticed, nothing gained
as it fears the dawn when the moon
recessed into the harbor of play:
the head of the beheaded despot
judgment against the living
the mirage of escape
stands still. Does not. Does. Go back
where she is studying the tides.
Go back to the beginning. The end.

 

 

Ann Lauterbach was born and grew up in New York City. After college (University of Wisconsin, Madison), she attended Columbia University on a Wood-row Wilson Fellowship, but moved to London before completing her MA in English literature. She lived in London for seven years, working variously in publishing and arts institutions. On her return, she worked for a number of years in art galleries in New York before she began teaching. She has taught at Brooklyn College, Columbia, Iowa, Princeton, and at the City College of New York and Graduate Center of CUNY. Since 1991 she has been Director of Writing in the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, where she has been, since 1999, Ruth and David Schwab II Professor of Languages and Literature. She is also a Visiting Core Critic in the Yale School of Art. Lauterbach has received a number of awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986 and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 1993. She lives in Germantown, New York.