Alice Fulton
Department of English
University of Michigan
alice.fulton@um.cc.umich.edu
==
It might mean immersion, that sign
I've used as title, the sign I call a bride
after the recessive threads in lace ==
the stitches forming deferential
space around the firm design.
It's the unconsidered
mortar between the silo's bricks == never admired
when we admire
the holdfast of the tiles (their copper of a robin's
breast abstracted into flat).
It's a seam made to show,
the deckle edge == constructivist touch.
The double equal that's nowhere to be found
in math. The dash
to the second power == dash to the max.
It might make visible the acoustic signals
of things about to flame. It might
let thermal expansion be syntactical. Let it
add stretch
while staying reticent, unspoken
as a comma. Don't get angry == protest == but a
comma seems so natural, you don't see it
when you read: it's gone to pure
transparency. Yes but.
The natural is what
poetry contests. Why else the line == why stanza == why
meter and the rest. Like wheels on snow
that leave a wake == that tread in white
without dilapidating
mystery == hinging
one phrase to the next == the brides.
Thus wed == the sentence cannot tell
whether it will end or melt or give
way to the fabulous == the snow that is
the mortar between winter's bricks == the wick that is
the white between the ink
Southbound in a Northbound Lane
A fetish is a story masquerading as an object.
--Robert Stoller
Her anatomically-correct smile
turned to frown when she turned
upside down: the inflatable naked woman
the student body tossed, cum laude,
through the graduating bleachers.
Like gossip, a bubble bred for turbulence,
she tumbled
to the Ph.D.'s, who stuffed her
under their seats.
I think the trick to falling is never landing
in the palm of someone's hand.
The lyric, which majored in ascent,
is free now to labor and cascade.
What goes up must ==
Waterfalling
means the story visits tributaries
at a distance from itself. Consider
what it takes to get us off
the ground: what engines laying waste
to oil. I'd rather hit the silk
from a span
and let gravity enhance my flight.
Though the aerodynamics of jets are steadystate
and can be calibrated,
I'd rather trust a parachute,
which exists in flux and can't be touched
by mathematical fixations.
In what disguise will she arrive --
whose dissent is imminent yet unscripted --
offensive as necessary?
Whose correct context is the sky.
Arrive like something spit out of a prism
in a primary tiger bodice. Be modern
as an electronic vigil light, precisely
delicate as nylon,
the ripstop kind, that withstands
40 pounds of pull per inch.
Spectators, if we jump together,
we'll bring the bleachers down.
"I was frightened. My flesh hissed
and I thought I'd perished,
but the sensation of descent vanishes
once the body stops accelerating.
It's astonishing how nothingness
firms up. Air takes on mass.
The transparent turns substantial.
I stretched out on that dense blue bed
until the canopy expanded
like a lung shoved from my body,
plucking me off the nothing matt.
What held me up was hard to glimpse
but intimate as mind or soul.
I sensed it was intensely friendly.
I almost thought it cared for me."
If you can't love me, let me down gently.
If you can't love me, don't touch me.
If we descend together
like Olympic skydivers or snowflakes
we can form patterns in freefall.
Like a beeswarm, we can make a brain
outside the body.
When falling is a means of flying,
the technique is to release.
How many worlds do you want,
my unpopular bodhisattva?
Let's sneak one past the culture's
fearless goalies, be neither one
nor the other, but a third
being, formerly thought de trop.
Before I throw my body off, my enemy
of the state, I'm going to kneel
and face the harsh music
that is space.
Call the Mainland
Nature hates a choir. Have you noticed
the lack of chorus in the country every dawn?
The birds spent the night looking down on earth
as that opaque, unstarred space.
The vivacious soundscape they create at day
must be their amazement
that the planet's still in place.
No wait. Time out and whoa. There I go --
coating the birds' tones with emotion,
hearing them as my own. I know, I know.
Yet I can't say birds aren't feeling
in their hollow bones some resonance of glad
that night has passed.
I can't claim their hearts don't shake
when the will to live another day
in the cascade of all that is
is strong. Emotion
makes its presence felt in flesh.
Maybe you've noticed -- the body speeds
its reflexes and is moved. It moves. It makes
the heart, lungs, and gut
remember their lives
like sleepers between bouts of sleep.
While more serene delights
are intellect selective, without cardiac effect:
the mind sparks
at a Borges story or elegant proof in math,
a bliss that doesn't shift
across the blood-
brain barrier. Such heady pleasures
are never for the birds.
To be key
rather than bit player, of independent means --
to sound your own agenda in polyphonic overlay
as day takes shape == as day takes shape
the birds begin their final take.
They'll never know themselves as symbols
of the sublime. Transcendent
messy shrines == whose music won't stoop
to unison or climax:
tell them I said hi.