oh baby 1
every time we
set out to solve
THE BIG PROBLEM,
harpoons in hand,
tearing apart
each envelope
and subway map,
forgetting one
another’s names
and parading
into the grove,
our rainy look
still ends up in the
middle of some
dreadful suburban
intersection,
where looks go.
this was all;
there was no trick.
the stands go up
on sunday and
asters rehearse
from the top,
on four-counts.
so, thank you, but
we’ll just go on
impersonating our
ancestors,
scatter their old
signs over the
surface of our
spring, our
sex and cavils
always played out
and understood,
like hearing someone
make the same joke
to two people
at the event.
redo yourself.
christ. say something.
you’ll see i can’t,
not without
numbering each crease
on my cortex,
which we all know
can't be done til
after the autopsy.
so next time you exclaim
“I've got it,
THE BIG PROBLEM
is mine for the final
instance; the map
set to music
at last! Au revoir,
typical instruments!
Au revoir, lunch plans!”
i'd ask that we stay
in the car just then,
as it's night
and things begin
to look rather big.
oh baby 2
Odette puts up cardboard bird feeder 9:32 in morning pit some
bird I think is the boy I think is the radiator pit loose ci-
garette I stuck in my desk drawer scratched TEXT THIS NUMBER
NOT WORTH YOUR TIME. It all takes place somewhere else: no
one is involved. The spare toonie the chime. The sun like a
strange plant growing in one’s garden. All this tracks and
transfers our motions through the nine eucalyptus days after-
ward when everything seems a kind froth, gathering final ess-
ences and beers from Delilah’s, avoiding photo: avoid long
hair photo, sun photo, velvet photo, tram photo, unrelated
photo; avoid length, sun, velvet, trams, and relation. How
grave!!!!! At once in the same corolla us tracking the
nodes, examples, satellites or asterisms, when there finally
in the whole script of sudden we’re overcome with the petrif-
ying sensation in our chests and fingertips that we’ve never
heard a word from each other’s mouths and maybe never heard
anything else from anywhere in the world, that maybe the
rumble of telecommunication has only ever become noumerable
through mishaps and forgotting, yes no matter how quick our
apologies or how sincere our mutual desire to turn inside-out.
It just happens this way. shudders flying in on rollerskates
} }}}}}the radish the repertoire. And now somewhere
two bubbles pop at the exact same time and there bang kablam
that’s where god is, he has a couple of pointers and a killer
sense of scheduling. Oh great. And maybe clear a throat for
things like validity and certitude, the raspberry the lino-
leum. Some parrot! real pit. For two weeks I take my coffee
the way you do and stop. You bike a little more slow to sure
this summer, waiting for a wrong reflex, and so everything on
the horizon is gifted a grand new lineage of representivity,
all the encyclopedias written and the positions faithfully
designated with their properties assigned and their presence
betrayed galaxies singing and merging so that you might even
spare a moment to see the day without imagining it. Posed to
stone: two creams no sugar. Ann Steel how I admire the
lateral richness of your liquors. There's something logarith-
mic to it, no? My heart gone out late whispering, you and I
with our feet up on the ottoman…
oh baby 3
Nose remove the rose from
Rose, or the was buzzing.
I like yours too. Two happy
People and a spotted dog.
Best to have arose, when it all gets quite serious with night-time
Candle whistling petty tunes or twiney twitchy ones.
Orange meant fascination and desire, peach
Freedom in modesty. Gray, lavender-sweet half-morning.
Everyone understood perfectly why the trees were felled
And what the water tower was for.
How to relieve something of its name.
Think the melody: you can’t. Now hear
With your lungs. While you were trying
Our majesty was down at Tom’s Tavern under
Commas and us all leaving the apartment with a paper airplane,
Bitter lips looking, picking up
A box of paintbrushes and leading it to shore or
February, when we offered to take each other’s picture.
Does the dog know that our mouths, our ears do the same things as hers,
Collating the oysters or tuning our instruments? and do they,
Hats with clean teeth, guest-room angle for sore serums, and still
Arose, alight, the inventors of this distance whose deepens, odorless at day-time
When the case was closed—
Their spleens were spleens and hearts hearts.
Who names the parts of my body?
Tibia, left-thumb, Bubblings of acid
In the pits and ports or hair shivering-wet
From the swimming pool. At the moment you run out
As a list of flames, all task or holiday, each role, series,
And perforation has been thoroughly discussed and remembered.
Try not to make a fist, or a formula.
oh baby 4
I
It’s careful work:
The ledge means nothing except the ground beneath it.
The cycle falters. The shape of your hand does not have to do with this,
Nor which constellations are setting at the hour some game of disquisitions
Rises out of us, one after the other, like a sand-covered angel.
II
not beside,
Romeo,
circumjacent.
III
Now the cards fly out. The hands were dealt too stiffly.
Car doors repeat. Halogen guess. OFFICER!
Soon every action, like
(guiding the small tensions)
(running into each other’s arms) (at the airport)
(higher orders of frog-hunting decisions)
, becomes suddenly tactile and flits away, gladly, like a quill.
IIII
My knowledge of the procedure was reached in the following manner.
Alms cross console, actually immanent, like thin walls at the cinema. Goodnight, Donnie.
Goodnight, Joe. Ta ta. Goodnight. Goodnight.
And the tide rolls in on us:
oh baby 5
New england left us stumped dumb sunsets so if we leaned too close to each other there was still always the side door and probably a sandwich. the music was after the train was after the just relievable stunned crosswalk each begging the other to shake it awake and stop turning: truth is until we could walk home at night without a jacket there was no reason to say that was that and this was this. and when we couldn’t count the rattling radiator with something descending we laid round all apricot and in the evening you let us regale you, oh we had wet shoes receipts glint fables decaf oh we threw the light on your back in your hair you said ok alright thats enough regaling. so with worries bus tickets all kinds of soft objects we went to the party and our best advice for partygoers was know when to be specific and general. and naturally we went on my young kestrel you must preserve the ascetic dream of diarists and never imagine the brain of a stranger. and if we ate oranges our advice to the oranges was take care of yourself and that the volume of a sphere is four-thirds pi times radius squared. and we wrote down that the greatest pleasure was to have no history but erased it because it gave us history and anyway writing is way out. we all like caraway now
oh baby 6
It is impossible to escape the impression. The velveteen wait is left in your stomach and what gets
delegated to you is only its forensics; you arrive at the moment through anything other than itself;
you wad up the page into a platinum block, a paperweight, but there is still a breath to be bathed
between the words which didn’t touch and now do. This seems to be the operation at hand. No tremors
and tethers here anymore— no night at post-station either. Gone were the days of message and correspond
except as topology, a household.
Take my name off your front door.
I won’t be getting my mail here no more.
Hello Hannah. Hello interested suburb.
Have you yet magnetized to your route through the evening? Its blueprint, its careful layout will tell
you easily how to inhabit yourself: it might take you behind the basketball courts and past the yard with
parked trucks and well into scents of lilac, wood glue, green apple candy, vinegar and cinnamon, and there
it will grant you one final wish. We love this for you, really.
Supper in May
Allez, allez
Still, these nights nothing
was more fragrant than a light in the city. Morning had an appetite,
and him, and new speeches, lists. And then the whole matter of what winces and whithers between us and the
literature’s distances. But none of us has even to be cross about it because that whole bad habit of placement
has worn off; we’ve lost track of what variable was plotted against what and now it’s just the absolute proportions
of everything over everything, no vertebrae, no orbit, peace out. It’s not happy or sad either, and it requires
absolutely no hardware. I said what. She said it requires absolutely no hardware.
When one-one won one race
Two-two won one too.
Drops glass fortune— sit down, it's important. The meanings froze in our
bellies, with their orders sorted, around the time of the job search. The
meanings fused with our fingertips on the upright piano, and were
indistinguishable from our recipes and skincare routines. Meanings
Where once there were glances, or over where once there were glares,
Dead shapes where once there were smooth surfaces and behaviors
Where once there were the boats at night which bobbed on the current.
So we all became impeccable Leninists, Kantians, Mennonites, and still
Planted our legs at the reception, breathed in when the silvery autumn
Suggested we should, which was precisely in time.
oh baby 7
Henri was in the yard preparing voices
And faces for the party, while we tried
Another time to let the sun determine
What we did with our thoughts and pens and bodies,
What noise and buttery smells were worth our weight
In begonias. This proved fruitless as the guests
Arrived with gaseous things, tremendous things,
Everyone whistling, learning how to die.
When you die you become images,
Placards, syntax, iambs with certain framerates,
Resolutions, and like that you’ll stay
Plastered to somebody else’s grammar,
Amazed until the other annotations
Jump out and grab you, tone to tone to tone
To toe. Too many hats and cups. This party
Will never abolish sun or cups or hats.
So coarse resounding things, delighted things,
Ensnared imperative ones, were not the same
As harps that act like sites of the material,
Plant their feet upon the silted sloop of
What actually is. We knew this and we cried
Anyway, like every silent second
Was a curse, like thunder couldn't pause
For us and hand us boots for all the mud (thank you thunder).
Regarding daytime, too, that garish phrase
Whose warble made us almost see clauses
In one another’s eyes, intentions, small
Martyrdoms, all to summon those sensations
Right up into the space between our noses, say, or
Divine them into signs, ouija style.
These tasks broke down precisely when some cold
But glassy gloss of eight brought forth the actors—
applause applause applause applause applause.
The roof reflects the sun. Looks like the sun,
Does sun things too. This leaves the matter of
The hats, which I shouldn't even have mentioned,
Because the time has passed for attitudes:
It’s now the hour for making known, so sprint
Outrageously to everyplace except
The street, which we must cross in dull forgiveness.
Where is the book whose letters can be read
In any order? Here is it, the wind—