Armantrout - Partly: new and selected poems, 2001-2015

part ly ALSO BY RAE ARMANTROUT ItselfJust SayingMoney ShotVersedNext LifeCollected ProseUp to SpeedVeil: New and Selected PoemsThe PretextTrueWesleyan Poetry part ly rae armantrout NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, 20012015 Wesleyan University Press Middletown, Connecticut Wesleyan University Press Middletown CT 06459 www.wesleyan.edu/wespress 2016 Rae Armantrout All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill Typeset in Adobe Jenson Pro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Armantrout, Rae, 1947 Title: Partly : new and selected poems, 20012015 / Rae Armantrout. Description: Middletown, Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press, [2016] | Series: Wesleyan poetry Identifiers: LCCN 2016001994 (print) | LCCN 2016006505 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819576552 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780819576569 (ebook) Classification: LCC PS3551.R455 A6 2016 (print) | LCC PS3551.R455 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016001994 5 4 3 2 1 This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Cover illustration: Goya, The Drowning Dog. Museo Nacional del Prado. FINALLY, for ChuckContentsNew PoemsLegacy Do words just pop
into your head? Some may go
unexploded.

Have you thought much
about your legacy? Im a legacy
prisoner. No Im not. What do you call precious? The precious doesnt
get around much so it stays small. Or it orbits
the same small
pronoun, a kid
on a carousel. Look at me! It fiddles
with itself. In Front Tree in new leaf in front of
a brick building with narrow
white-wood balconies slung under panes
of glass in which a tree is being
dissected before an audience
of one, none,
hundreds. In Front Tree in new leaf in front of
a brick building with narrow
white-wood balconies slung under panes
of glass in which a tree is being
dissected before an audience
of one, none,
hundreds.

New twigs
do the splits as I once did Exchange City of the future
in which each subway stations stairs
lead to the ground floor
of a casino/
mall. What counts
is the role defined for each piece by a system of rules saying how it can move, not the stuff the piece is made of. In the intersection,
a muscular, shirtless man
with small American
flags tied to each wrist
so that he looks
like a wrestler
pushes, no, shoves
then catches a stroller
piled high with plastic bags
his stuff. City of the future,
where a tramway to the top
of a peak
opens onto
a wax museum
in which
Michael Jackson
extends one gloved hand Canary Some folks got tortured
by folks right afterwards
at an obscure farmers market
where handcrafted soda and artisanal mining showed we were on the right track. Canaries served as coq-au-vin. Mistakes The subject will claim
that she has been taken
to the wrong place. Mistakes The subject will claim
that she has been taken
to the wrong place.

That the room she is brought back to is not the room she left. That these comings and goings
are happening
to someone else, are gathering momentum
controlled by a secret
mechanism. That she needs to tell
someone. I walk out the door
to the stone bench without meaning to
(without meaning it?), each step
jarring my frame as it would anyones If One cultivates
a garden of peculiars beyond reproach a plant like a half
folded accordion, a plant like a pale
rock, split in two as if to ask, Where is the original? (and a few
self-starters with their sharp
rocket-fin leaves.) You, husk-light,
forgetful, with these
hollow bones, this fly-away hair, are you ready
for a new season? If its just this:
nutmeg-flavored latte, pumpkin Surplus I sat on the patio and wrote Each afternoon I would sit on the patio where one waggish, unmoored
tendril nodded emphatically and the tree cast a web of nervous yet
resilient shadows, while the crickets had no idea what they were
insisting on but then whats an idea? I might visualize living sculpture (in which subjectivity, unable
to either detach itself from the body or direct it, had a public
experience of itself as surplus) without wishing to harm anyone. In fact, I did. Assembly With large red lips,
a ceramic fish face
in a pink knit pouch
from which spinelike
sticks protrude
is suspended
above the work station.

Though ghosts dont exist,
electrons on the mirrors surface
absorb arriving photons and,
in their excitement,
emit others that
come back your way,
replicate a woman. Outburst What do you like best
about the present? Reflection its spangle
and its non
locality: those eucalyptus leaves
as points of light splashed over this windshield. What if every moment
is a best guess
on a pop quiz? As if waking up, I stop explaining Tony Sopranos outburst to his aggravated
henchmen. Taking Place Once we liked the conspicuous
but constrained, the push-up bra
under the shirtwaist, a small bow
at the throat, the appearance
of a struggle toward the diminutive,
the punctum. The slender
second hand jerking forward
as if helpless, making its same sound. We might stand
in a thicket where a battle had
taken place and be thrilled
by the far-off roar of traffic Easily The models in the Gentlemens Club ad
are posed with pink mouths slack,
eyes narrowed
to slits.

Show me stunned resentment the way the world absorbs
an insult
it wont easily
forget Partly In this ad for Newfoundland,
an old woman
steps onto the porch
of the lone house
on a remote cove
and shakes a white sheet
at a partly cloudy sky as if Matched burgundy berries
on adjacent stems, perfect ear bobs, with no one
wearing them Parallel Worlds Theory When a new bar called
The Air-Conditioned Lounge
opens and its sign
is in old-time cursive
this is ironic because the building
is a concrete box
and the sign
looks like a gift card,
no, this is ironic
because its claim
is true but does nothing
to distinguish it. Either this sign
is a reversal
of the many
novel yet dubious
claims we endure or it expresses
guarded nostalgia
for a time when it was that easy
to be cool. Those branches
are good because they remind me
of others. The others
are the same but small Word Problems If a fat man with one earlobe distended
by a large ring and a thin man
in a heavy neck chain sit together
checking email The real is made up
of things minus
appearance near eucalyptus strands
of green crescents and their shadowsflighty
half-moons while the soul
is made up
of appearance
minus things Action Potential Who sequesters
negatively charged
ions and waits. Miltons devils
make me sad the way Satan must cross
chaos and dark night
hour by hour
to reach us,
actually flying
as if space were real,
the way he stops
and asks directions Who runs
along the tops
of trains, leaping
from car to car,
ratcheted
into the present
in his topcoat if there is no Torn If the whole ragged
current were a creature, we could expect it
to both anticipate
and remember the splash it makes
here on this rock, its acrobatic performance