Dots
1
Poems elongate moments.
“My pee is hot,” she said,
dreamily, mildly
surprised.
2
“The bunny-mermaid
was my brand!”
a voice
in the radio
cries.
3
Ostracods
squirt dots of light
in the deep
ocean.
ξ
Familiars
People look up synonyms
for metaphor.
*
Renee calls her mask
“Maskie”
and laughs
as if she were
in on
the trick
of ensoulment.
*
Vines draped
on a blanched
trellis:
veins.
ξ
In Time
1
What can I complain about
next? Not
the conveyor-belt
of seasons.
“Just keep it coming,”
we once said —
or someone said
for us.
Here’s spring again
briefly glorious.
2
First thing this morning,
two dead bees curled up
to form a parenthesis.
That’s not quite
haiku, but
who’s counting?
3
B movies tell us
that our time is up
so we don’t believe it.
A virus that causes
everyone but you
to kill themselves?
A haze that causes
a dissociative state.
ξ
Installations
1
I try to convince her
I do like her work —
a crumbling earthen structure,
cracks and crevices filled
with installations:
a pop-up thistle,
a glow-in-the-dark scorpion.
2
An actual ice-cream-truck
rings out the notes
once known as
Farmer-in-the-Dell.
3
A steady stream of as
as as
requires my attention.
Walk with me, dear.
We’ll like things
in particular.
ξ
Poise
A branch
of purple orchids
poised mid-air.
“Poised” meaning
to stand in relation
to a future
that isn’t there.
Time meaning rhythm
in music
as elsewhere.
A flicker knocks
on a bare trunk.
A flicker being a lone
drummer.
ξ
Writing for the Poetry Foundation, David Woo says that Rae Armantrout’s recent book Finalists (Wesleyan 2022) “emanates the radiant astonishment of living thought.” Her 2018 book, Wobble, was a finalist for the National Book Award that year. Her other books with Wesleyan include Partly: New and Selected Poems, Just Saying, Money Shot, and Versed. In 2010, Versed won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. Retired from UC San Diego where she was professor of poetry and poetics. She is the current judge of the Yale Younger Poets Prize.