THREE POEMS by ALICE FULTON Dept. of English University of Michigan alice.fulton@um.cc.umich.edu _Postmodern Culture_ v.4 n.3 (May, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu Copyright (c) 1994 by Alice Fulton, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, Oxford University Press. == It might mean immersion, that sign I've used as title, the sign I call a bride after the recessive threads in lace == the stitches forming deferential space around the firm design. It's the unconsidered mortar between the silo's bricks == never admired when we admire the holdfast of the tiles (their copper of a robin's breast abstracted into flat). It's a seam made to show, the deckle edge == constructivist touch. The double equal that's nowhere to be found in math. The dash to the second power == dash to the max. It might make visible the acoustic signals of things about to flame. It might let thermal expansion be syntactical. Let it add stretch while staying reticent, unspoken as a comma. Don't get angry == protest == but a comma seems so natural, you don't see it when you read: it's gone to pure transparency. Yes but. The natural is what poetry contests. Why else the line == why stanza == why meter and the rest. Like wheels on snow that leave a wake == that tread in white without dilapidating mystery == hinging one phrase to the next == the brides. Thus wed == the sentence cannot tell whether it will end or melt or give way to the fabulous == the snow that is the mortar between winter's bricks == the wick that is the white between the ink [--------------------------------------------------] Southbound In A Northbound Lane "_A fetish is a story masquerading as an object._" --Robert Stoller Her anatomically-correct smile turned to frown when she turned upside down: the inflatable naked woman the student body tossed, cum laude, through the graduating bleachers. Like gossip, a bubble bred for turbulence, she tumbled to the Ph.D.'s, who stuffed her under their seats. I think the trick to falling is never landing in the palm of someone's hand. The lyric, which majored in ascent, is free now to labor and cascade. What goes up must == Waterfalling means the story visits tributaries at a distance from itself. Consider what it takes to get us off the ground: what engines laying waste to oil. I'd rather hit the silk from a span and let gravity enhance my flight. Though the aerodynamics of jets are steadystate and can be calibrated, I'd rather trust a parachute, which exists in flux and can't be touched by mathematical fixations. In what disguise will she arrive -- whose dissent is imminent yet unscripted -- offensive as necessary? Whose correct context is the sky. Arrive like something spit out of a prism in a primary tiger bodice. Be modern as an electronic vigil light, precisely delicate as nylon, the ripstop kind, that withstands 40 pounds of pull per inch. Spectators, if we jump together, we'll bring the bleachers down. "I was frightened. My flesh hissed and I thought I'd perished, but the sensation of descent vanishes once the body stops accelerating. It's astonishing how nothingness firms up. Air takes on mass. The transparent turns substantial. I stretched out on that dense blue bed until the canopy expanded like a lung shoved from my body, plucking me off the nothing matt. What held me up was hard to glimpse but intimate as mind or soul. I sensed it was intensely friendly. I almost thought it cared for me." If you can't love me, let me down gently. If you can't love me, don't touch me. If we descend together like Olympic skydivers or snowflakes we can form patterns in freefall. Like a beeswarm, we can make a brain outside the body. When falling is a means of flying, the technique is to release. How many worlds do you want, my unpopular bodhisattva? Let's sneak one past the culture's fearless goalies, be neither one nor the other, but a third being, formerly thought _de trop_. Before I throw my body off, my enemy of the state, I'm going to kneel and face the harsh music that is space. [--------------------------------------------------] Call The Mainland Nature hates a choir. Have you noticed the lack of chorus in the country every dawn? The birds spent the night looking down on earth as that opaque, unstarred space. The vivacious soundscape they create at day must be their amazement that the planet's still in place. No wait. Time out and whoa. There I go -- coating the birds' tones with emotion, hearing them as my own. I know, I know. Yet I can't say birds aren't feeling in their hollow bones some resonance of glad that night has passed. I can't claim their hearts don't shake when the will to live another day in the cascade of all that is is strong. Emotion makes its presence felt in flesh. Maybe you've noticed -- the body speeds its reflexes and is moved. It moves. It makes the heart, lungs, and gut remember their lives like sleepers between bouts of sleep. While more serene delights are intellect selective, without cardiac effect: the mind sparks at a Borges story or elegant proof in math, a bliss that doesn't shift across the blood- brain barrier. Such heady pleasures are never for the birds. To be key rather than bit player, of independent means -- to sound your own agenda in polyphonic overlay as day takes shape == as day takes shape the birds begin their final take. They'll never know themselves as symbols of the sublime. Transcendent messy shrines == whose music won't stoop to unison or climax: tell them I said hi. -----END FILE-----