Carla Harryman

from Open Box

      ¶


We are not going to the end
Without baby’s little friend
Finding head’s infinity
Organized by me

Start at the small of the back and glide out over
Everyday life
Continuous without a leg
To stand on non-event

Revoke
Towering figure
Remember
Let

So get this
Now
Frequency off
To Africa


      ¶


Rain again
What the young
Know
And I know

With names locked in foreground
Around the corner
There is no water
There is no water

The psyche of the poet
Exceeds the poem
Without the poem
Disappearing

Into an exterior world
In which it cannot survive
The poem is therefore
A representation of an edge


      ¶


Performed
In other world
Not this
Once

With head on straight
Extract
For water
Be a bond

Be blue and other
Without the cover
Weather
Less and less than

Plash where my feet
Fish doves
And fallen wolves
Define


      ¶


As no sound sign could ever
Fret
And go that way
That way

As twice
Is joy mounted
Neutrality switched
Repression compressed

How many forms of
Here I was will
Open or close
Another

Not
Land
Nor
Three sided


      ¶


Soma
On meadow aching
Modern
Annie

Minding
Indefinitely
Not
Dreamy which way

Portraits shadow every action
The curving line
Is not abstraction
Completely dissed

I didn’t know I even knew you
Is that a big
Has the hook
Fish


      ¶


Line
Embankment
Fiber
Wall flaming

With squirrels dancing
To pelted syllables
Slapped with sprawl
Over post urban

Can can
Debris organized
Labor switched to witch
Why worldly

My lands
Becomes remark unheard of
In the corporate parts
River sludge


      ¶


Along whose banks the artists kissed
And gave alms of hieroglyphs
Calligraphies of disorder
Much needed

In one place, here
Not in another, there
The war in sand there
Kisses the dead river here

Nothing a poem can erase
My lands remarks
Much needed
Sands dead river

The writer of this poem
Shining it up had not thought
To be an American
Polishing


      ¶


A European not-me
Or of the Middle East or Mexico
Sanding away
Each disappearing within an other

Less fabric
For the dress of nation
A fashionable plan prevails
Roughed thin masculinity

Except in the highest places
You don’t wanna go there
But I do and won’t
Speak to the slayers

No singularity can make power
Crowd gathers fragments
Rough it up
Think first


      ¶


Floating above
Fences lined with truck
Rush that order
Brush up your tremor

Then act
Up
A stabbed note
Image spat

Axel
To be let
Lethal
Over be

Warning
This is all going away
If
Then obliterated words


      ¶

Carla Harryman

Carla Harryman’s most recent book, Baby , is forthcoming from Adventures in Poetry in the spring of 2005. She is the author of twelve books including the experimental novel Gardener of Stars (see Jacket 14) and the selection of inter-genre writings There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn. She is a 2005 award recipient in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Performing Arts. She has created and collaborated in the creation of many works for interdisciplinary performance. Her most recent performance work is Mirror Play, which will be performed with the musician-composer Jon Raskin on jaws harps at the San Francisco Historical Society in March 2005. She lives in the Detroit area and is on the faculty of the English Department of Wayne State University.