Laura Carter
Two Poems
Of Surface
We needled our way into the evening soup like bright birds.
One girl lost a leg at the beginning of the narrative.
I held her hand and whispered about the avant-garde.
It’s the totality without the destruction.
That’s a situationist motif, an anvil.
I caught up to the anchor in the bottom of the bowl.
There was a jagged light leaking out of a new computer.
Who owns the this, and from which place does the this make its way?The wind brought what we knew not,
and the puddled lilacs not yet laminated melted
in our mouths. But no! That’s a no to life without the wheel, I have to say.
Trying to find out what to mind and what to keep
is the hardest part of the story. The second-hardest part
is delineating all the objects. For books
I’ll take instruction manuals and dictionaries.
The distinctions between our lovers were predicated
on some multiple. But no! Not in the mouth, not
in the obvious mystery, not the swimming pool emptied of its water,
(just) the reaching for the phone from over the edge
of the bed. So yes! I’m calling. I’m calling the depth
back. The two knees are still kneeling in a peace.
Nature
He broke the ice. I followed
the body through the tunnel.
Come visible redness
and erase figured
redness with the kites flying o’er
the elisions of kites in the temple
and take your late lunch
maybe it’s yr late lunch and if early
the pocket over the heart would
make the body invisible once
more. Amber’s for Mars and Mars is cold
and has dusty seasons
where the bride is an escaped prisoner eccentric
to the proposition the poem makes of brides
and that was all Rubens
money in the lake and gravity pulling the body
back down and in the kitchen the wicked man. Oh!In dreams there’s a tiny moon at the center
and in the center of the moon another center
pulled taut as the hamstrings of runners
making conversation audible
or disabling paratactics for the sake
of the race. We speed into the darkness of our sleep
and an (I) emerges only to find that I is
an outdated proposition, a blue thought
outlasting the temple
a glass pouring its contents up into the air.
Come visible blue
and erase invisible blueness
in the silence holding fortress
on the edges of edges
carrying buckets of water
to where we sit at a table around which no one will eat.