Lauterbach - Hum

HUM ALSO BY ANN LAUTERBACH Also by Ann Lauterbach If in Time: Selected Poems 19752000On a StairAnd for ExampleClamorBefore RecollectionMany Times, But ThenThe Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience BOOKS WITH ARTISTS Thripsis
(with Joe Brainard) A Clown, Some Colors, A Doll, Her Stories,
A Song, A Moonlit Cove
(with Ellen Phelan) How Things Bear Their Telling
(with Lucio Pozzi) Greeks
(with Jan Groover and Bruce Boice) Sacred Weather
(with Louisa Chase) HUM ANN LAUTERBACH PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 USA * Canada * UK * Ireland * Australia New Zealand * India * South Africa * China penguin.com A Penguin Random House Company Copyright 2005 by Ann Lauterbach Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lauterbach, Ann, 1942 Hum / Ann Lauterbach. cm. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-101-66048-5 I. Title. PS3562.A844H86 2005 811.54dc22 2004058740 constitutes an extension of this copyright page. for Tom

Some of these poems appeared, often in earlier drafts, in the following journals; I thank their editors: Avec, The Bard Papers, Conjunctions, Court Green, Fence, Five Fingers Review, No: A Journal of the Arts; 26: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics. Bookmark, Horizon first appeared in A Convergence of Birds, Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer (New York, Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2001). Detail 858-6 (Gerhard Richter) was published in Richter 858 Eight Abstract Pictures, edited by David Breskin (San Francisco, The Shifting Foundation, SF MOMA; distributed by D.A.P.). After Mahler was published in The Best American Poetry 2004, edited by Lyn Hejinian (New York, Scribners).

For the score to Mahlers Kindertotenlieder, used on the jacket, thanks to Karen Garthe. Thanks also to my marvelous agent, Lourdes Lopez, and to my editor at Penguin, Paul Slovak, for his continued support of this work. What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes
with no eyes. Look with thine ears. SHAKESPEARE, KING LEAR, IV. 6 If you listen with your ear, it is hard to understand.
If you hear with your eye, you are intimate at last. WU-MEN KUAN One AFTER MAHLER

Maybe it will fall away. Maybe what is interesting will also be beautiful although that is that is: not to look out or at, but into.

Come closer, so close what you see can be seen as hindsight. The form seems too simple. The form seems an error of judgment. As if one had jumped across a boundary to find the missing gift, left in the brute junk of wandering gangs. This is another way of speaking about intention, about the theater of gathering.

The day, you see? Huge, like Texas.

I saw a hawk today the birds froze. Today I saw a hawk the small birds were still. A hawk on a branch tail and shoulders straight, a soldier is what I thought, its small head moved in all directions excellent robot I thought. The small birds were still as if without life to escape the eye of the hawk. The day, you see? Huge, like Texas, or Bach, Bach never still, it is the nature of Bach not to stay still to move in the orders of Bach sometimes they seem limitless as if out of the earths orbit or to come to the limits of earth and then to go on up over down so that day can no longer be seen. The boys in the water froze.

The thing over Texas broke up.

You will have been glad iconography sweetly daunted what is the ab in abjection? Keith wondered. We sought no rule. The piano was, after all, a man. And she reached her slender arms into it, made it slur its edges into sonic attenuation. And the man rammed his throat onto his long instrument, its noise gathered and broke from.

At school, those who had some notion of history quoted it, as if it were a thing away, others simply traversed its wake into sampling and presence as if the dead president were finally of no account other than his horse and carnage. History failed to come forth, it spat back trivia and made a form. So these are the famous shoes and this the painted mountain and these are the vernacular ghosts strutting their tunes into the storm, its violent indifference. The catbird walked along the grass and took bugs back to the nest. She seemed almost friendly in her indifference. But the subject, its identity, proclaimed nothing so much as similarity, a field halted at proof, undermining fact, its cruel accomplishment.

Something thrown, but where? Down, under, into the suffering? As in abduct, abuse.to Keith Sanborn

To maximize the dim effects of dream declaw the cat. Also, name the mother in the dream, that one, spilling on the first violinist in the quartet who sways in a crimson gown. Or that one, sad on her cot with only one eye, blinking at the wreath hung on the wall where the fire was. That is not a dream. Get rid of it. To maximize the dim effects of dream read Nabokov and listen to rain.

The woman with the long dark hair in the corner was that the mother? The rich Christians in the west speak in tongues. What do they say? Are they speaking to God risen like a sun over mountains? The mother was not there, so that also is not the dream. Nabokov spoke in tongues, the hilarity of his rue and rage teased from his mothers as from the milk of human kindness. Drink the apparition.

Lost reckoning wing wing side by side measures the fleets standard edition atlas, bird, cup one after another, so. The service policy addressed all three, and credit only the added attraction unlisted except as an exclusive so you needed cash in hand and a fast format If nothing resonates in this plot, try again. But in order to find what we feel is right, if it is right, we will need to make whose justification may be the actual feeling after day or night.

Might there also be a scheme, a contest, something to cover errors, make good from the dump, find the thing under the other things, one that cannot be seen from here. Sing, brothers: Dre e e e am,dream dream dream. Some remain mute, wrapped inside the hull slow boat to ch ch ch agrees to trade invades s s s these are intimate sounds and pictures lost behind clouds. Power of Disney and the Pink Floyd oggles animated s s sgraphic cats tinker toys inhabited archive Afloat, pushed to shore, a pink shoe, a blond doll, personal stuff. You might find me cast in that direction breathing with difficulty wishing never to find myself at sea again. The jokey ephemera of the age makes me believe the birds are thirsty, pecking the dry bath. What sweeps over the country its glass eye, so that we see through, but not into, ordinary habits of daily life? The horizon, bewitched by fog, caused them to spin