Three Poems

Alice Fulton

Department of English
University of Michigan
alice.fulton@um.cc.umich.edu

 

==

 

     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.