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Each Next
Published in an edition of 750 copies. These are twelve difficult but very rewarding experimental writings.
- GenresPoetry
56 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
6 people want to read
About the author
Kathleen Fraser
31 books11 followersAfter graduating in English Literature, 1959, from Occidental College (California), Kathleen Fraser went to NYC to work as an editorial associate for Mademoiselle magazine, pursuing her poetic studies with Stanly Kunitz at The 92nd St. Y "Poetry Center" and, briefly, with Robert Lowell and Kenneth Koch at The New School. At this time, she began to meet a number of New York poets associated with Black Mountain, The Objectivists and the New York School. Among these poets, those to have most important influence on her work were Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest and George Oppen. She later counted the works of Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson and Basil Bunting as having a serious impact on her poetics. In 1964 she won the Frank O'Hara Poetry Prize and the American Academy's "Discovery Award". Other writing fellowships have included two NEA Poetry grants, in 1971 and 1978, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry in 1981.
After seven years as a journalist - writing and editing - and the publication of her first book - Change of Address [Kayak, 1968] - , Fraser was invited to teach as a poet-in-residence for two years at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where her university teaching career began. She taught, subsequently, in contemporary literature and writing programs at Reed College and at San Francisco State University where she remained as a Professor of Creative Writing through 1992. In her early years at SFSU, Fraser directed The Poetry Center and founded the American Poetry Archives.
From 1983-1991, Fraser published and edited HOW(ever), a journal focused on innovative writing by contemporary women and "erased" or neglected texts by Anglo/American modernist women writers, together with associate editors Frances Jaffer, Beverly Dahlen and Susan Gevirtz and contributing editors Carolyn Burke and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Fraser has just completed a manuscript of essays - Translating the Unspeakable - on those American poets and poetics having a particular impact on her own writing and thinking.
She has published twelve volumes of poems and two children's books, including What I Want (1974), Magritte Series (1977), New Shoes (1978), Each Next, narratives (1980), Something (even human voices) in the foreground, a lake (1984), Notes Preceding Trust (1987) , When New Time Folds Up (1993) and WING (1995). Her most recent collection, - il cuore : the heart - New & Selected Poems ( 1970-1995), was published by Wesleyan University Press in the Fall of 1997. Fraser splits her time between San Francisco and Rome where she lives with her husband, the philosopher/playwright Arthur Bierman, from March through June . She has lectured and given readings at a number of Italian universities and has translated Lampi e acqua, a book-length serial poem by Maria Obino (excerpts published in AVEC), and a selection of poems by Toni Maraini, Daniela Attanasi, Sara Zanghi and Giovanna Sandri (published in Thirteenth Moon, "Italian Women Writers" issue).
After seven years as a journalist - writing and editing - and the publication of her first book - Change of Address [Kayak, 1968] - , Fraser was invited to teach as a poet-in-residence for two years at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where her university teaching career began. She taught, subsequently, in contemporary literature and writing programs at Reed College and at San Francisco State University where she remained as a Professor of Creative Writing through 1992. In her early years at SFSU, Fraser directed The Poetry Center and founded the American Poetry Archives.
From 1983-1991, Fraser published and edited HOW(ever), a journal focused on innovative writing by contemporary women and "erased" or neglected texts by Anglo/American modernist women writers, together with associate editors Frances Jaffer, Beverly Dahlen and Susan Gevirtz and contributing editors Carolyn Burke and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Fraser has just completed a manuscript of essays - Translating the Unspeakable - on those American poets and poetics having a particular impact on her own writing and thinking.
She has published twelve volumes of poems and two children's books, including What I Want (1974), Magritte Series (1977), New Shoes (1978), Each Next, narratives (1980), Something (even human voices) in the foreground, a lake (1984), Notes Preceding Trust (1987) , When New Time Folds Up (1993) and WING (1995). Her most recent collection, - il cuore : the heart - New & Selected Poems ( 1970-1995), was published by Wesleyan University Press in the Fall of 1997. Fraser splits her time between San Francisco and Rome where she lives with her husband, the philosopher/playwright Arthur Bierman, from March through June . She has lectured and given readings at a number of Italian universities and has translated Lampi e acqua, a book-length serial poem by Maria Obino (excerpts published in AVEC), and a selection of poems by Toni Maraini, Daniela Attanasi, Sara Zanghi and Giovanna Sandri (published in Thirteenth Moon, "Italian Women Writers" issue).
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January 22, 2022
Dear other, I address you in sentences. I need your nods and I hear your echoes. There is a forward movement still, as each word is a precedent for what new order. You can hear a distant habit. The sound of a low gas flame discharging. Even a hiss is only soothing because it is dark and nearing the shorter perimeters. When I run into boredom, I shift into another's past.
(She was "in a fury" and she wept in spite of herself. His letter told the usual stories in all the old ways. She swallowed them whole. Then came the nausea. She wanted a "flow" she thought, but in the translation it was corrected, displacing the o and substituting a. She could give herself to an accident. She was looking out the window.)
This is the Year of Our Lord. Every year we always have these difficulties. The sound of water splatting from the bathroom, heard through the kitchen, the clank of a soap dish. "I'm going to take a shower," David bragged, striding through the room on his twelfth birthday.
I tried to protect myself especially well. I had time to play at domesticity this year. Three-quarters cup of bourbon in the chocolate-covered bourbon balls. There were many occasions and I was there in a different skirt. I went to the sales with her. She believed in that and built up her vocabulary like a wardrobe purchased during then different years, but only on December 26th.
[...]
* * *
"How is she?" I asked.
"She is well. She is just fine," he said. "My Lily is back. I have my family back. I can take the sitter home now. Would you like me to do that? The tires are bad, so I go up hills slowly. But Lily doesn't mind."
Who is Lily? I think. I try to remember which one Lily is. I feel she is probably one third of his nuclear family. The other third is his Aunt Cora, sitting in an airplane above Los Angeles. Her ambience hovers - a thin trail of white smoke drifting always above and behind him. One can almost hear the gossamer command of her voice in his childhood, filtered like light falling perpetually upon him. Her shadow is a light jacket, his little coat from the third grade.
Listening to him speak of Lily, I decided that he must be speaking of his lover. I thought i understood him. That is, I immediately provided a set of images from which to identify this object of his affection. To my ear, his all-embracing acceptance of Lily sounded romantic and excessive. I felt a bit jealous. I compared his feeling for her to a cloud of dust escaping form a vacuum cleaner. Yet as the dust cleared, things took on their true shapes. I understood Lily was his dog. "White Lily of my family," he called her. "I wanted a family," I once heard him say to himself.
His voice was a kind of scenery behind the scrim one sees at the front of the stage, at the apron of the stage where Lily was forever wagging her tail. Lily, who had been lost, was now back in his arms. There existed among us a scenario, stitching together our lives at intervals: this tin can of dogfood he opened and spooned into a dish for her, linked Lily's love of dogfood to his love of Lily to my romantic projection of his "other life."
[...]
* * *
Today a package at my door. Brown wrapping paper, imprinted three times with the same foreign currency - a golden cow with herringbone wings and tail, the number 20 under its belly and the word EIRE stamped in white against a marine blue background.
*
I was looking through my collection of black silk beauty marks. Mouches pour bal cut from a black field of silk at 42, Rue de Cabrol. A horse. Two horses pulling a carriage. Star. Heart. Star, heart, half-moon. A gentleman in a top hat. Dashing off, as they say. I was looking for a mark. A sign to place abruptly there, on the white field of the paper. To hold your attention for an instant only. Then would move the prediction you had made for yourself. Now you would be riding, either on the bare back of the horse or inside the carriage where you wouldn't be seen but could look out from the gold leaf casements. As you like.
[...]
* * *
Water pushing in ear. Fluttering first apprehension of little piece of wing, scale not wet, something thin, taking sound, struck, mimetic as in tympani. Mimosa. Tympanum of wind or (hollow sounds) (resound) and it couldn't get out.
Drops any day. For days try fingers. Whole palm of hand cupped clapping up small suction to reduce moisture draw outward and once again into all that wet. Once. No one is here. Flat blue feet. Deeply. All mine. Someone calling it beauitful. "I don't know who is in charge of what's beautiful . . . I mean, who's the boss of beauty around here?" Grace protests from the podium, as if we are all sitting at her kitchen table. That intimacy of burning toast. Oasis.
Who, says Grace. Olympic and lengthy. Colour theory has something to say about blue. The word GREEN comes first. A probably error. Fill in the blanks of what that might mean. Francie had poured the paint. Dipped her brush in and flooded the brush hairs and she spread it all over. Poured the paint while he told a story. Lots of dark in there. She painted over the shadows the projector made.
Bump into Francie's body swimming while thinking only yesterday of her, swimming with baby inside her in other pool, different neighbourhood. But here they both are, swimming past me in the water. I see her, here, but think in past tense, located in images of Langston St., or morning light in her loft skimming paintings, or Life magazine's "Development of Embryo," seeing who would be my child, now David, had fins and eye sockets.
[...]
* * *
When he uses
the word it
clatters, it return
loud where the
word is a
marble. It sha-na-na
or not. It
long ago. The
word will never
come back but
any word. It
does use. Back
does come back.
*
When I'm lying in my crib, was I was
my hands wrapped around inside white.
Mittens cotton. Not to get out.
Waiting we feel bu not
when the Chicago "El" goes by
against the window. Crib tied
on outside track. Light tied to inch.
Infinite exactly inch, feeling bars of it
separate.
*
He kept saying
suddenly it wasn't
a river when
it was ice.
His voice was
never there all
the time the
light was yellow
the crib bars
were white. The
"El" went up.
We were in
my buggy. Everything
was in air
and the same
size. Little particles
of black but
in the white.
*
She jumped out from the dark.
Her name is Lena Pergola in the hallway.
She liked to eat spaghetti. There were big spoons.
And all the spaghetti for everyone falling off itself
on the platter. With red tomato sauce.
She hitchhiked with someone handsome like my uncle who shaved.
I stood in his bathroom first. I was almost up. Steam all over
the air and sweet bottles. "You like me, hunh?"
[...]
* * *
Why avoid the typewriter? The type. Because you always find something. Because it is never all you meant to say but more than you wished to say. Not as exact or as complex. The sound of a drillhammer outside the window. And more intrusive because it is Sunday. Water moaning through the pipes downstairs. Someone awake, beside me. I had wished for cloudy skies and they were here now. Since the light began to appear. Falling. Right after the taxi came. I told my houseguest it would be daylight in the clouds by the time she shut her suitcase. Listening to the brass latches click. Luggage that goes on and on and is always too heavy and part of something missing. Matched pieces. The '50s.
I tried to write you a letter yesterday. I had to stop because I couldn't begin. Too much prelude. I wanted to record how odd I'd felt with you, over the last week. For that is how our time is measured. This week and last week. The interiors of weeks that expand or contract, depending upon what happens in our other lives or where each of us must travel. Walking along the highway, what struck me was the difference between the two weeks. The one before this, so full of appetite.
[...]
* * *
Footsteps hitting the sidewalk, closely paces and light in their weight.
One inch deep into cement, running easily on his way to Catholic school. Morning epilepsy. The bell had rung in the air. Matins, seven minutes before the hour.
She put her foot on an ice flow. The space between her legs might spread or be pulled by the weight of the glacier. Step lightly and watch it melt. Is it a matter of trust, to put your best foot forward on a sinking island?
Bare arms in cool October sun, lying on one's left elbow, hair strewn between fingers, weight on heel of palm, you become the girl in the white dress among weeds and summer flowers in the poster above a friend's bed, above a lover's towel rack, behind plastic at the Whitney.
Will you be my Stella by Starlight?
I will be your white bars of Moonlight Sonata falling off furniture. Indentations in door panels. Shadows puddle, resist clear edges.
8:30 is really 8:15.
What is turning to rust cannot be heard. The wings of what she thought were termites had appeared twice at the window. Wanting to keep identification in shadow.
Two orange-covered pillows, one with black stripes lolling, rumpled and awry. Smooth ticket.
Events about to indent. Paragraphs were massing but she experienced a neutrality unlike adrenalin. Percussion.
Loud air strung with red lines of sound, the colour of Daidee's toothpaste, which she left and came back for. Her matching toothbrush, put away in a side drawer.
Rowing into pleasure. Now you row, I want to just look at the ducks.
When they warm up their engine and I'm in bed, I want to kill them.
You've got dark night of the soul, he said, shaking his plastic thermometer.
I've got wine-dark sea, she replied.
* * *
I
Less believing, what surrounds these yards and gate.
Younger to chew and spit out and that's it.
Take that. But it's o beautiful on the way
to the swing to secretly harbor this excess.
You can't help it, was noticed not indiscreetly.
One's mind with slow waves' "boys" bobbing in it.
A man of your weight hesitates in the sunglasses section.
You bob your hair which is a disguise for your contacts.
New contact will always reveal who it looks like,
on floor in dust. Your eye going bang
to enter life (yours) as a BAM in cartoons.
Explosion inside explosion but not so successful
in black-and-white. The post-modern era.
[...]
* * *
Some people look. Some people look and respond. Ron draws a floor plan. He is dressed in beige corduroy. His downtown suit. In the lobby, when he comes up to me, I forgot how to talk to him in different clothes. A Chinese girl blows her nose. Debbie comes into the room, which is the idea of a room, inside the rotunda, the larger central room of the museum, with a pink hemp bag hanging from her wrist. She sits down next to the bottle of cranapple juice. She says, "Boring." Describing her day. Full lunar eclipse. She's upset because her transmission broke down. Eating dinner together. Din-din. A pain. Stomach. Sequin seats. "So I jumped out."
[...]
* * *
Nothing so old and so new, is no longer there. Full of all day.
Awake awake. 5 a.m. she awoke, was awakened into a tight gut.
A rip into that deep sleep. Something alarming, filling up the
body. Filling inch by inch through the hours designated as dark.
Piling up. About to pour over the rim. Holding lids tight. One lie
and then the next. They had their own lives and erased her.
*
In a small room, she is sitting now on a chair, in a row of five. She
is listening and plunging. She knows she could be less than
everything. Could a loud thought be heard? Would someone
next to her reply? His leather shoes has laces. Possibly it would
pass. Losing my edges. About to be splitting. Like a peach.
Overfull. These thoughts, but still half wanting to keep cheerful.
Laugh when he calls. Whom she loves more than anything. Not
to make a habit. But wanting him to hold. And to hold. You are
to me . . . beyond utterance . . . I cannot tell you how important
you . . . how unhappy . . . how tomorrow, I . . .
*
Black notebooks. Poets carried them full of pages. These, to-
night. She noticed that. She thought about her notebook covered
with needlepoint, the flowers stitched to their colours. At the
garage sale, someone had left it and she had found it. No heavy
bindings. No black thick. "Have I refused a certain sign of
seriousness?"
[...]
* * *
is just coming into your blue room
which ruins another person's life.
You can get right off the hook.
To put out his own scare you have a child. Enough of these goings.
You'll proliferate now, thoughts misbegotten to strike through every face truly. People whom you are.
Getting on with this blank, are you saying
one should follow when the position comes? Etcetera. Etcetera.
I think that door is closed.
If only he didn't close. You shouldn't waste metric time.
The mental passage is somewhat over. That will occur to you strongly. Nobody's knocking.
Alternate head of steam. A tap dance might be, possibly, another route.
How do you say "Bring in folks," "One guy," "Breakthrough."
We all go up and everybody
gets his limit and his hope. Your empty page needs
voices and very little to do, where you stand off-base, forming various whites from the window.
(Females who have never lived a female life, when in fact they need two.)
What you'll refer to. A dream of separate rooms.
The red room. The blue room.
You're in the present. That little place opens when you drop inside.
Your fresh start.
* * *
September 4
The sunset again, a favourite time of the horizon he might wish to play out.
Less than what was meant, as a last point of resistance, then its answer or echo or next.
It could be in the identification of spectrum order. A colour which didn't include red. Or, if one had the temperament, all the possible red categories.
Values of red.
*
Coffee takes its immediate effect; a system had been registering its blurrr. Things were not right. "Not quite," he said.
The holidays and their deliberate, agonizingly habitual tables. Too much animal fat. Beef ribs and lamb ribs in succession, in sauce with equally warm cooks. Focus on the gesture and an appropriate "ummmm good" dissevers him from a clear path that had achieved a balance he now took for granted in the wake of hiccups.
[...]
(She was "in a fury" and she wept in spite of herself. His letter told the usual stories in all the old ways. She swallowed them whole. Then came the nausea. She wanted a "flow" she thought, but in the translation it was corrected, displacing the o and substituting a. She could give herself to an accident. She was looking out the window.)
This is the Year of Our Lord. Every year we always have these difficulties. The sound of water splatting from the bathroom, heard through the kitchen, the clank of a soap dish. "I'm going to take a shower," David bragged, striding through the room on his twelfth birthday.
I tried to protect myself especially well. I had time to play at domesticity this year. Three-quarters cup of bourbon in the chocolate-covered bourbon balls. There were many occasions and I was there in a different skirt. I went to the sales with her. She believed in that and built up her vocabulary like a wardrobe purchased during then different years, but only on December 26th.
[...]
- this. notes. new year., pg. 11
* * *
"How is she?" I asked.
"She is well. She is just fine," he said. "My Lily is back. I have my family back. I can take the sitter home now. Would you like me to do that? The tires are bad, so I go up hills slowly. But Lily doesn't mind."
Who is Lily? I think. I try to remember which one Lily is. I feel she is probably one third of his nuclear family. The other third is his Aunt Cora, sitting in an airplane above Los Angeles. Her ambience hovers - a thin trail of white smoke drifting always above and behind him. One can almost hear the gossamer command of her voice in his childhood, filtered like light falling perpetually upon him. Her shadow is a light jacket, his little coat from the third grade.
Listening to him speak of Lily, I decided that he must be speaking of his lover. I thought i understood him. That is, I immediately provided a set of images from which to identify this object of his affection. To my ear, his all-embracing acceptance of Lily sounded romantic and excessive. I felt a bit jealous. I compared his feeling for her to a cloud of dust escaping form a vacuum cleaner. Yet as the dust cleared, things took on their true shapes. I understood Lily was his dog. "White Lily of my family," he called her. "I wanted a family," I once heard him say to himself.
His voice was a kind of scenery behind the scrim one sees at the front of the stage, at the apron of the stage where Lily was forever wagging her tail. Lily, who had been lost, was now back in his arms. There existed among us a scenario, stitching together our lives at intervals: this tin can of dogfood he opened and spooned into a dish for her, linked Lily's love of dogfood to his love of Lily to my romantic projection of his "other life."
[...]
- Lily, Lois & Flaubert: the site of loss, for Robert Glück, pg. 14
* * *
Today a package at my door. Brown wrapping paper, imprinted three times with the same foreign currency - a golden cow with herringbone wings and tail, the number 20 under its belly and the word EIRE stamped in white against a marine blue background.
*
I was looking through my collection of black silk beauty marks. Mouches pour bal cut from a black field of silk at 42, Rue de Cabrol. A horse. Two horses pulling a carriage. Star. Heart. Star, heart, half-moon. A gentleman in a top hat. Dashing off, as they say. I was looking for a mark. A sign to place abruptly there, on the white field of the paper. To hold your attention for an instant only. Then would move the prediction you had made for yourself. Now you would be riding, either on the bare back of the horse or inside the carriage where you wouldn't be seen but could look out from the gold leaf casements. As you like.
[...]
- The decision, pg. 17
* * *
Water pushing in ear. Fluttering first apprehension of little piece of wing, scale not wet, something thin, taking sound, struck, mimetic as in tympani. Mimosa. Tympanum of wind or (hollow sounds) (resound) and it couldn't get out.
Drops any day. For days try fingers. Whole palm of hand cupped clapping up small suction to reduce moisture draw outward and once again into all that wet. Once. No one is here. Flat blue feet. Deeply. All mine. Someone calling it beauitful. "I don't know who is in charge of what's beautiful . . . I mean, who's the boss of beauty around here?" Grace protests from the podium, as if we are all sitting at her kitchen table. That intimacy of burning toast. Oasis.
Who, says Grace. Olympic and lengthy. Colour theory has something to say about blue. The word GREEN comes first. A probably error. Fill in the blanks of what that might mean. Francie had poured the paint. Dipped her brush in and flooded the brush hairs and she spread it all over. Poured the paint while he told a story. Lots of dark in there. She painted over the shadows the projector made.
Bump into Francie's body swimming while thinking only yesterday of her, swimming with baby inside her in other pool, different neighbourhood. But here they both are, swimming past me in the water. I see her, here, but think in past tense, located in images of Langston St., or morning light in her loft skimming paintings, or Life magazine's "Development of Embryo," seeing who would be my child, now David, had fins and eye sockets.
[...]
- Green and blue piece, for Francie Shaw & Grace Paley, pg. 20
* * *
When he uses
the word it
clatters, it return
loud where the
word is a
marble. It sha-na-na
or not. It
long ago. The
word will never
come back but
any word. It
does use. Back
does come back.
*
When I'm lying in my crib, was I was
my hands wrapped around inside white.
Mittens cotton. Not to get out.
Waiting we feel bu not
when the Chicago "El" goes by
against the window. Crib tied
on outside track. Light tied to inch.
Infinite exactly inch, feeling bars of it
separate.
*
He kept saying
suddenly it wasn't
a river when
it was ice.
His voice was
never there all
the time the
light was yellow
the crib bars
were white. The
"El" went up.
We were in
my buggy. Everything
was in air
and the same
size. Little particles
of black but
in the white.
*
She jumped out from the dark.
Her name is Lena Pergola in the hallway.
She liked to eat spaghetti. There were big spoons.
And all the spaghetti for everyone falling off itself
on the platter. With red tomato sauce.
She hitchhiked with someone handsome like my uncle who shaved.
I stood in his bathroom first. I was almost up. Steam all over
the air and sweet bottles. "You like me, hunh?"
[...]
- Lena Pergola, pg. 23-24
* * *
"For the smallest social unit is not the single person, but
two people. In life, too, we develop one another."
- Bertolt Brecht
Why avoid the typewriter? The type. Because you always find something. Because it is never all you meant to say but more than you wished to say. Not as exact or as complex. The sound of a drillhammer outside the window. And more intrusive because it is Sunday. Water moaning through the pipes downstairs. Someone awake, beside me. I had wished for cloudy skies and they were here now. Since the light began to appear. Falling. Right after the taxi came. I told my houseguest it would be daylight in the clouds by the time she shut her suitcase. Listening to the brass latches click. Luggage that goes on and on and is always too heavy and part of something missing. Matched pieces. The '50s.
I tried to write you a letter yesterday. I had to stop because I couldn't begin. Too much prelude. I wanted to record how odd I'd felt with you, over the last week. For that is how our time is measured. This week and last week. The interiors of weeks that expand or contract, depending upon what happens in our other lives or where each of us must travel. Walking along the highway, what struck me was the difference between the two weeks. The one before this, so full of appetite.
[...]
- Talking to myself talking to you, to & for A.K.B., pg. 27
* * *
Footsteps hitting the sidewalk, closely paces and light in their weight.
One inch deep into cement, running easily on his way to Catholic school. Morning epilepsy. The bell had rung in the air. Matins, seven minutes before the hour.
She put her foot on an ice flow. The space between her legs might spread or be pulled by the weight of the glacier. Step lightly and watch it melt. Is it a matter of trust, to put your best foot forward on a sinking island?
Bare arms in cool October sun, lying on one's left elbow, hair strewn between fingers, weight on heel of palm, you become the girl in the white dress among weeds and summer flowers in the poster above a friend's bed, above a lover's towel rack, behind plastic at the Whitney.
Will you be my Stella by Starlight?
I will be your white bars of Moonlight Sonata falling off furniture. Indentations in door panels. Shadows puddle, resist clear edges.
8:30 is really 8:15.
What is turning to rust cannot be heard. The wings of what she thought were termites had appeared twice at the window. Wanting to keep identification in shadow.
Two orange-covered pillows, one with black stripes lolling, rumpled and awry. Smooth ticket.
Events about to indent. Paragraphs were massing but she experienced a neutrality unlike adrenalin. Percussion.
Loud air strung with red lines of sound, the colour of Daidee's toothpaste, which she left and came back for. Her matching toothbrush, put away in a side drawer.
Rowing into pleasure. Now you row, I want to just look at the ducks.
When they warm up their engine and I'm in bed, I want to kill them.
You've got dark night of the soul, he said, shaking his plastic thermometer.
I've got wine-dark sea, she replied.
- Side drawer, pg. 35-36
* * *
I
Less believing, what surrounds these yards and gate.
Younger to chew and spit out and that's it.
Take that. But it's o beautiful on the way
to the swing to secretly harbor this excess.
You can't help it, was noticed not indiscreetly.
One's mind with slow waves' "boys" bobbing in it.
A man of your weight hesitates in the sunglasses section.
You bob your hair which is a disguise for your contacts.
New contact will always reveal who it looks like,
on floor in dust. Your eye going bang
to enter life (yours) as a BAM in cartoons.
Explosion inside explosion but not so successful
in black-and-white. The post-modern era.
[...]
- Fried. Lily, for Steve Benson, pg. 37
* * *
Some people look. Some people look and respond. Ron draws a floor plan. He is dressed in beige corduroy. His downtown suit. In the lobby, when he comes up to me, I forgot how to talk to him in different clothes. A Chinese girl blows her nose. Debbie comes into the room, which is the idea of a room, inside the rotunda, the larger central room of the museum, with a pink hemp bag hanging from her wrist. She sits down next to the bottle of cranapple juice. She says, "Boring." Describing her day. Full lunar eclipse. She's upset because her transmission broke down. Eating dinner together. Din-din. A pain. Stomach. Sequin seats. "So I jumped out."
[...]
- "Discrete Pitches", pg. 39
* * *
Nothing so old and so new, is no longer there. Full of all day.
Awake awake. 5 a.m. she awoke, was awakened into a tight gut.
A rip into that deep sleep. Something alarming, filling up the
body. Filling inch by inch through the hours designated as dark.
Piling up. About to pour over the rim. Holding lids tight. One lie
and then the next. They had their own lives and erased her.
*
In a small room, she is sitting now on a chair, in a row of five. She
is listening and plunging. She knows she could be less than
everything. Could a loud thought be heard? Would someone
next to her reply? His leather shoes has laces. Possibly it would
pass. Losing my edges. About to be splitting. Like a peach.
Overfull. These thoughts, but still half wanting to keep cheerful.
Laugh when he calls. Whom she loves more than anything. Not
to make a habit. But wanting him to hold. And to hold. You are
to me . . . beyond utterance . . . I cannot tell you how important
you . . . how unhappy . . . how tomorrow, I . . .
*
Black notebooks. Poets carried them full of pages. These, to-
night. She noticed that. She thought about her notebook covered
with needlepoint, the flowers stitched to their colours. At the
garage sale, someone had left it and she had found it. No heavy
bindings. No black thick. "Have I refused a certain sign of
seriousness?"
[...]
- Piling up about to pour over, pg. 42
* * *
is just coming into your blue room
which ruins another person's life.
You can get right off the hook.
To put out his own scare you have a child. Enough of these goings.
You'll proliferate now, thoughts misbegotten to strike through every face truly. People whom you are.
Getting on with this blank, are you saying
one should follow when the position comes? Etcetera. Etcetera.
I think that door is closed.
If only he didn't close. You shouldn't waste metric time.
The mental passage is somewhat over. That will occur to you strongly. Nobody's knocking.
Alternate head of steam. A tap dance might be, possibly, another route.
How do you say "Bring in folks," "One guy," "Breakthrough."
We all go up and everybody
gets his limit and his hope. Your empty page needs
voices and very little to do, where you stand off-base, forming various whites from the window.
(Females who have never lived a female life, when in fact they need two.)
What you'll refer to. A dream of separate rooms.
The red room. The blue room.
You're in the present. That little place opens when you drop inside.
Your fresh start.
- Somebody who is hooked on the colour red, pg. 47
* * *
September 4
The sunset again, a favourite time of the horizon he might wish to play out.
Less than what was meant, as a last point of resistance, then its answer or echo or next.
It could be in the identification of spectrum order. A colour which didn't include red. Or, if one had the temperament, all the possible red categories.
Values of red.
*
Coffee takes its immediate effect; a system had been registering its blurrr. Things were not right. "Not quite," he said.
The holidays and their deliberate, agonizingly habitual tables. Too much animal fat. Beef ribs and lamb ribs in succession, in sauce with equally warm cooks. Focus on the gesture and an appropriate "ummmm good" dissevers him from a clear path that had achieved a balance he now took for granted in the wake of hiccups.
[...]
- Notes re: Each, pg. 48
October 24, 2023
Pretty little chapbook. Read too closely in succession, Fraser's staccato sentence fragments can be wearying, but she also shows a great deal of playfulness in her language which remains engaging. The final suite of pieces references the classical Narcissus and Echo, and how can I turn away from that?
November 5, 2011
Great Bay Area avant-poetics!
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