Four poems by Laurie Blauner
Episodic Days in the Desert
I tried to unravel the beauty. Walking backwards,
my preoccupied hair under a fat hat. Afternoons,
your laughing mismanaged me. I was resigned
to the scuttling, blinking yellow and red, sand-
colored boredom for miles, the creeping and the crawling.
Yours, not the animals. My happiness was short of breath.
I mistook everything for you, the time between night
and day, a fistful of hair, the scorpion.
I meant to undo my speech. A rock smiled. You
grew empty while light wanted everything.
Your damp fingers scared me;
silent conversations. In the sky I saw
clouds explode as if we were back
in the city confessing to machines.
We exchanged bodies that couldn't save us.
Time boasted and water emptied
our perspectives. We were listening to
a bright blackness I'd call a blue.
I dream of who you used to be,
apologizing for the inconvenience.
Momentary Distractions of the Immense Kind
I get directions for a pretty, little landscape
but I'm so confused that I keep repeating myself,
my movement a migration of possibility.
A glimpse of: what for? A glimpse of:
it once began. The stories between buildings,
the sky whispers about people
who aren't what they used to be. I'm prescribed
night & food. But what does it really matter?
The savory shadows are for the willing.
I sit back in my tiny chair, waiting for my breath
to break. My blood races around to find you
& is thwarted. It's not that I've fallen
& can't get back up, but it's something
like that. Outside I notice the trees' utterances,
which are voices making a decision &
an undertow of wind, the wreckage of desire.
A cloud that couldn't be anything
but a cloud. & I feel knots through my skin
like the anatomy of a leaf. It could happen
to anyone, the earth moving one way, the sky
another and I've forgotten where I was going.
A Prayer & Something to Go with It
Deceive me with dialogue between a bird
& a branch that won't cooperate.
My body wants more, an apparatus it can
call its own. To fly, at least to climb
up the tree trunk that counts the stars overhead
backwards & forwards each night. A clarity.
I don't know if life will let me decide
this or that & I have misplaced
my weightlessness, that is, the state where I grow
smaller until no one notices me.
I make enough mistakes that hardly recognize me.
I avoid the moon with its enormous punctuation
marks. How can I answer when I don't understand
the question? I was outside, counting clouds,
which have fallen onto hard times. When they complain,
I hate the way they sound. All I know is
that I interrupt myself, returning to the same place,
a bird pleading for more sky. I hold onto broken objects,
my landscape filled with enough darkness to fix
anything. And how can I ask for more than that?
In the Distance, How Can I Tell?
I tell the insolent road that we only just met.
Stars reach through the eyebrows of trees, stare,
turn back. It’s the age of the self, they say, laughing,
and we’ve made a mistake. I turn back, make more
leaves, yell things no one needs to know. The
fences, cars, houses don’t want to stop, mumble their
little epilogues. There’s too much radio music and
oncoming archipelagos of light. Moonlight peels it all
away. Underneath, the forlorn and neglected stagger.
I pull into a field, grow quiet, think how roots
run wild, and grass blades can’t stay still. Just
like children. And who isn’t an astronomer of their
own desire? Sky explains how it would go about
changing everything.
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