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| Five Elegies (The Unfollowing) Lyn Hejinian |
Out comes a girl from the quick damnation that brings her forth I love my eyelids and lips—I, a denizen of the interstitial crack that’s home to dreams that half a hundred hunters have pursued to no avail Between having to live and having to die, a rabbit has no means of despising the present The horizon is lidded She’s moving forward, pushing the shopping cart with the tiger that has temporarily adopted her but isn’t hers riding in it, its jaws slightly open, its tail twitching as it looks back up the street toward the distance from which they’ve come There’s resemblance, but it’s sweeter, like early carrots The cow has fallen overboard and it’s only thanks to Clara’s quick thinking that the Captain doesn’t follow Next to come onto the market is a kind of panty condom for women to wear The two are shaking crabs from the bits of raw chicken tied to strings they’ve been lowering into the shallow waters of the lagoon and pulling up in the summer sun back into the lagoon so they can crab some more I slide the side of the conic end of a Derwent 7B “graphic pencil” across a small patch of the page, abruptly change its course, giving an angle to the deepening dimension of a lead cloud They took everything away—the nose, the mouth, and then the ears Why not associate small dogs with cold butter, hesitation with play, finger puppets with habit, ogling with red buttons Me too Thinkers get driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of their thinking *** And the poplars in the wind It’s Monday, and Tuesday is already under way, Wednesday having fled several days ago to join yesterday in the immense realm that we’ll one day know as that of the adjacent-to-the- real Even the great botanist Carl L thought the fern dust he found hovering close to the ground as puzzling as his own nature She walks awhile unreconciled a hundred miles through chamomile The play of the imagination is violent I see a yellow pumpkin on a dozen desert stumps Is passion a model for patience then: patience the proof, the patch, the put on and putting upon? The narrative zigzags but has no name though it’s called Assailed and then Curtailed Chip is the name of a fallen sparrow who listens to some girls as they stack scraps of lumber at dusk around her and declare her safe for the night Waving a pinwheel in my enthusiasm I advance Along comes a duck waddling by through a flock between the eyes An serum, an man, an bad job, an bomb and then a other bomb I first read it eleven days ago but as if unconsciously that is I… Flowers are free natural beauties but horses are not? *** Three barbarians are on the bank of a river whose beauty is theatrical, so they are doing blue things, bovine things, emitted things, sand-bottomed things, reflective things, things leaving playful impressions I cannot hear except with eyes What of the boy, the house—the boy dazzled by house—and what of the unhorsed girl, you ask, and I say, the girl is horsed again and the boy has laughed[1] Along comes a moment—unspent, uninterrupted, arriving incognito Always add Then I bought the groceries today from my favorite checker Dave the union activist and motorcyclist who’s now got his gray hair pulled back in a weensy ponytail If night were endless and the sound of a river whose current carries stones, then our travels by bed could be perilous We begin our investigations in a haunted house of many living creatures which, like mementos, carry their own memory charge, lots of energy Noise and noise shown concurrently in play, hurriedly calling for father Let’s walk under trees with people on grass toward a house invisible to everyone else You have an egg in your hand and you are putting your toes down ahead of your heels, you are breathing on your fingertips, you have an avocado in your hand, and against the chill of stupidity you exercise irony The batted particular ball goes over the wall and there’s no reunification and return And is this why we are so fond of having feelings? Impediments fly *** Ghosts are the shadows of knowledge we crave My computer’s spellchecker resists “thou,” it wants “I” to proceed with “though” If you pay too much attention to your feet when jumping from rock to rock you’ll… She tilts the pencil, draws still There’s a small spider overhead and a paper bag of recyclable cans on the floor, a black tote bag saying outside of a dog a book is a man’s best friend and inside a dog it’s too dark to read hangs from the knob of the kitchen door, beside the toaster the coffee in the yellow cup advertising cheese supérieure en poids et qualité is getting cold Keep telling me Take as a case in point a duck’s noun, going around even now the islands of the separate As privately—even secretly—as one’s response to music, one…and one What you see! As a child I used always to read a book lying on my side continuously, head resting on palm, and now I read upright repeatedly To come, to go—around the lake, behind the house, into the city, over the bridge—to pass judgment Strike palm against pail Monkeys zero in, we’re in an “us place”—wide—it’s a game ground, without lights Now for wildlife comedy *** Puddings don’t have lungs, melons don’t have riders Listen—a female seal, a seaport, and a social world Come day’s end the top of the tree hesitates, pauses, then sweeps on like a blackboard eraser to clear the horizon Sit, Shep, incognito The lid of the sun is heavy, its lashes blink on the horizon, brushing the curve of the sea Now they want to grant federal coal subsidies?! I heard “suspected pipe bomb” as “suspected python” The first nest empty and deep, at child’s eye level, in a young fir tree, of twigs Pathos is at the front line of defense against worries as they approach I remember almost nothing, only that I am in a room with others and we are reading through sacks of mail, trying to ferret out spies She will never believe she’s too old to join a band or make quick vertical moves on the playing field to really quiet music—she is that still Then the sparrow went to sleep in a lumber castle And so we come to chapter LIX, in which I learn that I have failed Can you believe this shit? forthcoming in Hambone magazine |
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