Armantrout - Itself

ITSELF ALSO BY
RAE ARMANTROUT Just Saying
Money Shot
Versed
Next Life
Collected Prose
Up to Speed
Veil: New and Selected Poems
The Pretext
True Rae Armantrout

R455A6 2015
811.54dc23 2014034434 This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
5 4 3 2 1 Cover: This photograph of a spongy decorator crab (Marcocoeloma trispinosum) shows how this particular crab used other living creatures to decorate itselfin this case by including some spectacular zoanthids (Zoanthus sp.). Decorator crabs attach a variety of living and nonliving material to their carapace (exoskeleton shell) as camouflage. This crab, living among a colony of the zoanthids, and was nearly invisible. Its camouflage shows the evolution of tool use at this primitive level of the animal kingdom. Courtesy of Coral Morphologic, www.coralmorphologic.com The animals themselves occupied only the last and largest chamber; the rest were filled with air. The walls between the chambers, known as septa, were fantastically elaborate, folded into intricate ruffles.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes to thank the editors of the following journals and anthologies: AnthologiesThe Best American Poetry 2014, Scribner, ed. David Lehman and Terrance Hayes The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare, Telephone Books,
ed. Sharmilla Cohen and Paul Legault Journals1913 A Journal of Forms, 580 Split, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Baffler, Blackbox Manifold, Boston Review, Burnside Review,Cambridge Literary Review, Chicago Review, Columbia Poetry Review,Conjunctions, Dusie Blog, The Fiddlehead, Grey Magazine, The Hat,Jacket2, Lana Turner, London Review of Books, Manor House Quarterly,N/A, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times Sunday Review (April 15, 2012), No, Plume, Poetry Magazine, Public Space, The Salz-berg Review, Wave Composition, West Wind Reviewone ITSELF CHIRALITY If I didnt need
to do anything,
would I? Would I oscillate
in two
or three dimensions? Would I summon
a beholder and change chirality
for him? A massless particle
passes through the void
with no resistance. Ask what it means
to pass through the void. Ask how it differs
from not passing. A CONCEIT Local anchors list the ways
viewers might enjoy tomorrow.

One says, Get some great , but
that seems like a stretch. The other snickers, meaning,
Where were you going with that? Like you thought Like you could defend
vanity in the sense of
idle conceit, vacuous self
absorption, doing whatever
it takes to whatever
because, really. As if to say, Conceit
is the vacuum energy. SPLIT Because you dodge
yourselves
by branching, (expelling particles
of light). Because you split
no-difference, sights strike me
as A muscular gray cat
trots along the top of
the cinderblock wall separating my couch
from the supermarket. 25% say, Thats
just it, Pam! I take these
white streaks of truck glimpsed
between branches to be blossoms.

INDUCTION Whats the take-away? Carrying plastic buckets,
an old couple stroll
along the high-water mark. The rapture: such
wings of cloud sleeves of fire
as previously noted. Passing obliquely
through the interface, desire is refracted. Low sun illuminates
a row of amber
pill bottles, half full. CONCLUSION A man is upset for many years
because hes heard
that information is destroyed
in a black hole. Question: What does this man mean
by information? The example given
is of a cry for help, but this is accompanied
by the image of a toy space ship,
upended, and is thus
not to be taken seriously.

The man recovers his peace of mind
when he ceases to believe
in passing through, when he becomes convinced
that the lost information is splattered
on the event horizon. The detective is the new mime. She acts out understanding
the way a mime
climbs an invisible wall. Its because our senses
are so poor that, on CSI,
the investigators
stand stock-still, boulders in a stream, while a crowd
pours around them. They pan
in slow motion, reminding us
of cameras, then focus
with inhuman clarity on the pattern of cracks
in a wall. Gods fractal
stammer pleasures us
again.

PITCH Beautiful,
the way the partita progresses and retreats
(repeats?). This node
virtually branching on two sides, without haste or
seeming intent, almost reluctantly,
in fact,
almost sending regrets. Long-Term Technologies
has made these fully nuanced,
self-reflexive stanzas sliver echoes Silver Acres widely available to the shelter-in-place
public. PRICE POINTS On a traffic island, a man waves his arms
as if conducting music,
and takes bows. He gets no points
for originality, plus were sick
of being represented. The tabloids are right.

An appearance
requires scandal. To be notable,
something must appear
instead of what? This spike reflects. This spike
reflects
global demand
for food
products. DIFFERENCE Catch us up
to where we are
today these pants!
this hair! Its been a good year
for unique, differentiated products. Im more interested
in quarks: up and down,
bottom and top, simple units
of meaning. If self-love
were a mirage, it would decorate
distance, shimmer over
others eyes, evaporate