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Of This

Ann Lauterbach

And so traverses, gun in hand, the creek.

We on the other side waiting dreamily

as for a wave. The head of the tree

is heavy. The pears are not ripe.

I do not dare look up, seeing as

the day has splurged against my face

and you are on the other side

where the grid breaks into tiny oracular

tiles, wafer thin, distorted, pale.

The huge sound is mechanical, not

expressionistic: things

into other things, exploding.

The serial furthers.

Were you wearing a sombrero or

just a hood to keep hot chords

from your skin? Serial, as in many

tunes, many kills, weeping

additions and accumulating, dry

remainders; the cost of endurance.

Ann Lauterbach's most recent book, Under the Sign, was published in September of 2013.

Themes

About this Poem

“I am not sure what the ‘this’ in ‘Of This’ is, other than a general apprehension of the state of things in our political-cultural world: the sense that violence is always near, that it is difficult to know where to look, and the rational ‘grid’ has lost its bearings as a way to clarity. I was reading recently a dialogue between Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács on early modernist expressionism. I am always interested in how subjective and objective ideas of reality are parsed. Seriality is one way to think about (historical) temporality in which some things remain and others drop away, and there is a remainder, what remains. What remains endures; or we endure what remains. Formally, I like to see how the poem attaches to its materials.”

—Ann Lauterbach

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More by this poet

Hum

The days are beautiful
The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.
The other is weather.

I know what weather is.
The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.
Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.
The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?
Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
Today is weather.

The sound of the weather
Is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.
Everyone weeps.

The tears of today
Will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.
The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.
The sound is falling.

The s

Ann Lauterbach

2005

The Translator's Dilemma

To foretell an ordinary mission, with fewer words.
With fewer, more ordinary, words.
Words of one syllable, for example.

For example: step and sleeve.
These are two favorites, among many.
Many can be found if I look closely.

But even if I look closely, surely a word is not
necessarily here, in the foreground.
I see an edge of a paper, I see orange.

I see words and I see things. An old story,
nothing to foretell the ordinary mission.
I see “her winter” and I see

And even the Romans fear her by now.

Ann Lauterbach

2013

Tent (audio only)

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Ann Lauterbach

2009

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Of This

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