RAE ARMANTROUT – California, USA

PREPAREDNESS

Animals find us eerie.
We can see what’s coming

in broad strokes–

washed out,
frequently displaced.

Still, it smites us.

Like ghosts we pass back and forth
between times,

stunned,

unable to feel
what we touch.

We believe in abstractions.

*
That’s one way to explain
our failure to prepare.

---

ON GROWTH

Dressed all in plastic,
which means oil,

we’re bright-eyed, scrambling
for the colored cubes

spilled
on the rug’s polymer.

Inside each
is a tiny car.

When we can’t unscrew the tops
we cry for help.

We’re optimists.

*

To sleep is to fall
into belief.

Airing even
our worst suspicions
may be pleasurable;

we are carried,
buoyed.

In sleep,
the body can heal itself,
grow larger.

Creatures that never wake
can sprout a whole new
limb,

a tail.

This may be wrong.

---

ON MELANCHOLY

What I thought of as a pleasant lingering
on things,
tender,
without the flurried rush of hope,
Freud call “Melancholia”:

“a state in which a person grieves
for a loss she is unable to identify.”

What I experienced
as a general attunement,
wishing only to continue–

a suspended attitude—

Freud described as
“narcissistic identification with the object
that becomes a substitute for the erotic
cathexis.”

And what if, in my case,
there are multiple objects–

whatever appears outside this window—

the dangling threads
of the weeping cypress,–

how I would love to make
the elegant, dismissive
gestures
of those long fingers—

beside the white
phone lines, plunging
almost straight down,
or up,
taut,

catching occasional rays of sun,

like a child’s idea
of a message

---

WHITE SKY

I want to end on something hopeful.

Someone has proposed
we seed the stratosphere

with diamond particles
reflecting back the sun.

I want to know
if they’ll twinkle.

Obviously, the stars are bad
role models—

distant, self-absorbed, and
volatile.

Explosions count as “standard
candles.”

Some say
we will need to change

the animals.

---

Rae Armantrout

Rae Armantrout’s interview can be found here.