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LAURIE PRICE

EPIGRAPH

This here is now. I lean in, I walk the august rocks of passage, tremendous rendezvous of tightened inquests, I descend the staircases of rude basements, navigate between the rusted pipes of belief. And I seat myself down, forever down where it is always now, where a twinned nanosecond blows persistently through the cracks. And the slamming of the shutters never stops, nor the dust-infused air, nor the concussion of glass with cement that goes on pounding and smashing and never breaks.

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WHITE NOISE

About ten minutes goes by in the hunting frame. By the arrows rising from the grass I see the main stem. Flotilla of shadows. Then a cloud rolls over to reveal the sun. To be lifted at such an angle from the city’s rough ledges balances a lull in the discussion. I begin with a retraction. I begin the same way I have for the past who-knows-how-many years. I grab my beer off the sidewalk and take a swig. The need for type O blood is constant, broadcast over all available airwaves. Hold my breath as the liquid warms threading down. The engines turn slowly at first, their movements barely perceptible. But let me go back and explain: my sense of ‘the’ truth is ‘my’ own. For this reason I begin having become as it were.

Smoke from a cigarette left in an ashtray rolls and unwinds in slow motion. As quickly as the smoke overtakes the room the sheer silence is faster. Point of entrance for nerve fibers and cells to dissolve. This numbing pulse of loss is sensate and octagonal climbing along thin strands of nerve release to collect in the nuclei. A pale blue verging on gray petals through the room unmoored. The fresh damp aroma sparks recognition, palpable as earth. Ah sweet sweet sweet September. The warning and the reprimands; the smoke wavers in a thick column not settling for days until the rains come. You chase it to there: your grief darkens in flames of boxed conclusions. Where steam rises from the frame the long thoughts bubble. Durations of octaves grounded by middle C.

The next frame holds a pattern of circulars. 

Into the irregular patterns of rectangles and squares I walk a cobblestone path to search for the Plaza of the Inquisition. The ground is uneven or falling rising slanted at various degrees. Torqued. Feel the tension rise from cement patches and the voices of others passing. “We live in trailer wipe. We live in ashen stage ashram noise.” The whispered solace of solitude joined to dead voices echoes. Never in negation was the thing more than. Lines of sunlight vibrate between buildings.

(Once late at night I saw white owls fly from one bell tower to the next to the next to the next. But this afternoon there are only groups of men and women inking old metal presses to spool out invitations or business cards, examples of which hang from the sides of their machines.) I am cheated of your tomorrow says the postered plea for mercy. “. . . wearing a red T-shirt, a large silver cross . . . has a raised mole above left eyebrow.”

 
Whenever we could we came there to delay the disappearing. She said if it wasn’t one thing it was two. Hedged all our bets to defray the tumble of torn edges from forming any kind of line. A beseechment to startle the revelers from their broken bits of talk and salutations. The revised revise, the risen rise. We mourn the dead. We speak of them fondly that we might occasion them. Them as yours as if your own. The borders I drew on that pane of glass propped against the windowframe were just an amusement. What I meant was that there could be more than one way to address an infiltration. It would be a tight squeeze to fit the location structure to the place point and without directions the best I could do was improvise. (To look inside the grief: the little waves and tendered manias.)

The constants are the flux and drone of car alarms when a bus rushes past. Music yells through big speakers into autumn rooms, which, lush as leaves swept into piles, star brittle textures anointing. Then the proteinacious drugs kick in. A muse of sucks. Brittle elements shift to tactics sometimes. Sometimes sleeping reasons are enemies. Who polishes their cross, their knife, its blade.

Trails and tangents are set and reset by footsteps wading through sagebrush and pine needles, leaves and clumps of hair. Girl with big feet nestles cornered in a camphor smell rising from a coat closet stuffed with notes. Fur drips slithering out from the cracks in arpeggios. The patter of tropical rain lingers while two strangers stop midstep in the street below to check their notes. Two sets of wet hands carefully unfold the papers. Clouds drift overhead uncertainly, clearing and boxing together to drift like smoke. Treetops appear blackened in the wet, slice through thick mist in waves. From here I see an open door weathered green in places, moss-hung drapings.

Strings that reverberate against a cherry wood backboard lend an air of solemnity to the occasion. Piano and slow. Controvoglia. That music could be tamed this way in trills or

rising gestures

                                                                           to complete the narratives inside

                                                                           was nourishment enough.

That what was expected would come to pass, that what could be hoped for would follow. The notes droned sinuous to deepen the paved distributions of the flattening tones. There was a restless fumbling around for keys that might have seemed human considering the divisions but the molting structures worked against it and the tuneful hollows assumed their positions.

An infinite approach to an infinitive will always begin with “I.” Then I could stand back and watch as the day folded into quadrants of multiples, assume my position at the head of the line.

I bound cords around papers trying to separate those that had been read from those that hadn’t. A slipknot seemed the logical approach. Heaving line, clove hitch. The stacked edges threaten to topple away from assembling.

If you study any part of a sequence too long the connections fall away and gravity seems to cease. The sky becomes a dense blue smudge drawn across the top of a window and hung there instead of glass. But if you turn around quickly and let the image fall into place by itself its attention to logic resumes as if no separation of belief had taken place. At the laundromat when the dryer won’t respond to the coindrop or button push: You’re there again it says. You’ve never been closer. That was what I strove for. Whirling helped to diagram the steps this dancer might take to lose the static equations.

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WHAT’S UGLY

Forget ink, butter, or warm things.

A sneeze in full air the goshen of,

and door slams shut that gravity pulls.

Inside are the clever tricks this day

bought for one final gain. To sponge

the materials begs another signal & share

in the latticework of a metal sheared

under the din of its music. Alone or not

the lah-di-dah hummed in yellow keys

and crowds call out the titles as they pass.

This one evidenced and that one

breaks apart. Red sweater at dusk. Wind

would laugh as bird is animate brushing only

at the tip. A small reminder of size

and frequency, weight and buzz. Endless

modifications make up the urge of throat

in gasp in dry approximations pencilling

classical complaints to it. Extreme

as a refuge of garishly painted houses

outside all means of survival means

what’s ugly survives without exclusions.

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                                   And even less to be unkind

                                   The scrubbed appearance of certain evasions like

was but isn’t now and the ragged edges

consequent as being a margin fed out

from the hollow the rattled echo shouldering

more than weight and the next one

that next straggled choice whining

is no competition for initial shocks

blurred edge, faint outline of just what

creamy blend of sharpness and blue

that erotic something once was

this fucking this      a century of

doubt and perspiration, premonition

okay but claims no experience

of prudence and less even to be unkind

reasons float like white lily pads

at the center, intussusception

I make a margin of my skin

to fit through an unobservable loophole

and disappear the masks   Is that hate?

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                               Slower than thought or vision you say 

                               it’s where the light stands, a march of

sheerest colors ’til you reach the one

that opens   Not the pale blue or grey

outline but softness like wood and tawny

almost old   The glisten over fingers curled

cooking mint tea over gas flame near a door

Silk does that too or sequins in wind   Jump

the rope black surge where details play you

for a spoon   Now the shine bowls an oval

deposit almost mineral so succinct    It’s not

what you think or how your feelings craft

what you see that someone’s voice

interrupts but the ambiguities come

inside and staking claims suffers nothing

to the known places that weaken

                               in plain sight our bedouin eyes.

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IT COSTS

Why not go inside I’m saying

What we were before this wind

and our sentences cut short

A life sentence to animate and people

with trees or boats and so many names

narrowed in to shifting shapes

but not arrowed down in transience

and so on and so forth

There’s enough space to be and let this

in and watch as space comes unexpected

and challenges, to be and let these things

wash over, dissolve

I go to truly enter the fluid

not concrete of these things that go

on moving barely in one place, palace

before the other things trespass

Tiger cat puddled between chair legs

knows this passage too,

how to get there      is      it costs

To be present and alive like breath

A line of permanence in perpetual dissolve

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LA CUENTA

Can I have the obsessive details please. Always

the wind, another kind of monster. Cold floor

releases moisture and why not say it

calms the nerves to sit here. Now. Capital.

A better like than no stains of previous mixtures

makes a better sharp. The point of falling down

and finding windows. My sole to my soul a wry

idea with no conclusion. Fold the paper money.

The grain of that becoming, unlike artifice.

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WAVES

to be in the foreign body as a luxury

of clandestine presence so only in my

apparent absence which is hidden but

shifted from the always there to

sometimes comes, sometimes stays,

sometimes goes alone to the beach

to walk inside the tidal atmosphere

and thick air, blowing sand & seagulls,

attributes of a resting place gaze, gazelles,

and let the words drift or sift as worlds

I’m coming into in a slow repose

to hear the sounds caught in their

throats as birds as language as bent

between the spaces I can imagine

if I keep my mouth closed & just listen

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  Poet and collagist/object maker Laurie Price is the author of Except for Memory (Pantograph Press), Under the Sign of the House (Detour/readme), The Assets (Situations), and Minim (Faux Press). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals over the years and from different locations. She lives and works in Granada, Spain.  See more here, here, here, here, here, and  here.