Rae Armantrout

Curled up in bed, I’m young in the old way. • One continuous stroke without lifting the pen as if “stem, tendril, stem tendril” were the words of a commandment. • My next elliptical loops read “Praise.” Word deciphered at a snail’s pace.

1 Did I say I was a creature of habit? I meant the opposite. I meant behavior is a pile of clothes I might or might not wear. Before all the sowing and reaping could go on for centuries, before the calendar, I must have been convinced that my movements were both mandated and blessed. 2 I've never been an old woman knitting by a fire but I've played one in images where it meant being foolish or wise, a mistress of distraction's indirection. To rock while entwining is life's work, but I am reckless, restless

There were distinctive dips and shivers in the various foliage, syncopated, almost cadenced in the way that once made him invent “understanding.” * Now the boss could say “parameters” and mean something like “I’ll pinch.” By repeating the gesture exactly the woman awakened an excited suspicion in the infant. When he awakened she was just returning from one of her little trips. It’s common to confuse the distance with flirtation: that expectant solemnity which seems to invite a kiss. * He stroked her carapace with his claw. They had developed a code in which each word appeared to refer to some abdicated function. Thus, in a department store, Petite Impressions might neighbor Town Square. But he exaggerated it by mincing words like “micturition,” setting scenes in which the dainty lover would pretend to leave. * Was it sadness or fear? He still wasn’t back. The act of identification, she recognized, was always a pleasure, but this lasting difference between sense and recognition made her unhappy or afraid. Once she was rewarded by the beams of headlights flitting in play.

What might be said to disport itself along the cinderblock in leaves. * What I write I write instead of ivy. * Green snouts in evidence or— more to the point— insolent and tense. * What might be said to writhe professionally as the days nod and wink.

Attending to verbal constructs makes care long-term, not acute, which is for the best because, though flawed, each one is salvageable or replaceable unlike my flesh. Words can be compared with moments, houses, trees, wires, wires, trees, houses. All stand on their marks. Still, there’s a lot of overlap. I move my eyes to make time. I take their measure and create a duplicate.

As one may be relieved by the myriad marigold faces held aloft beside the freeway — their articulation — and, too, by the rush of notes following their own likenesses in these headlong phrases Relieved of what? Relieved of what?

1 Touch each chakra in turn and say, “Nothing shocks me.” 2 Watching bombs fall on Syria, we feel serious, occupied, not preoccupied as we were previously. 3 “Makes me end, where I begun,” wrote   John Donne, turning love into geometry.

1 This blank sky between parallel wires reserved for penmanship practice. 2 The cold rays of the bristle cone, she writes — she who admires imitations. Such sparse coronas surrounding every knobby fist! 3 “Naught” must follow “for” which will come after “all.” Come as “always,” walking backwards

Operation Phantom Fury. *       *       * The full force of the will to live is fixed on the next occasion: someone coming with a tray, someone calling a number. *       *       * Each material fact is a pose, an answer waiting to be chosen. "Just so," it says. "Ask again!"

After John Milton Our light is never spent. Is spent. Thus have we scooped out maceration reservoirs. We will blaze forth what remains as pixels. Great angels fly at our behest between towers, along axons and dendrites, so that things stand as they stand in the recruited present.