Under the Sign by Ann Lauterbach

Author:Ann Lauterbach [Lauterbach, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry, American, General
ISBN: 9780143124184
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2013-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

29.

I get up, make coffee, and begin to reread Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen. Acuity of his rage, consciousness in relation to rage, perhaps the acuity of the fact of consciousness as the site of persistent rage—spleen: the City the site of a disjunction between the world as observed—things, persons, creatures—and the world as or in thought.

Something there: an unraveling of the seam/seem that stitched world to word. Is this in part what moved and animated Walter Benjamin?

30.

Get better at it! Scold, out of energy, ambition, music. It was not a good idea to look out. It was a worse idea to look inward, where just that morning an object not recognizable as among the living but nevertheless alive had removed another tooth from her mouth and performed some other unseemly acts before she had had my first cup of coffee. Where then? To the side, an open page sizzling with merit and glee. Under the desk, a lame match barely visible on the sand carpet. Up at the cornice where an intricate tracery of shadow hovered and writhed, depending on the speed of wind. If one could look at sound, if one could leave the door to the dream slightly ajar, if one could, for once, refuse another nut. But the thin, empty boat of shell, pristine as only a shell can be, not far from the single oatmeal grain, with a slit up its center, a whole continent away from the other, larger shell, the one from the sea, wretched with black ash whose stench bears no resemblance to that of the roiling waters from which it had come, a ruffled scallop, its wide mouth hinged to its twin, innards intact; the tiny shell was proof that the nut, the pistachio, had been consumed. In the unblistered snowy landscape she could almost hear the waves crash, see the waters recess while at the same time sinking, rendering the sand a thick paste where footprints had, only moments before, been perfectly visible. She could also hear, over her right shoulder, male voices and the occasional crack of the fire and the train reassembling the air into a loud rustle that seemed to merge with the wind.

Calamity has forsaken vocabulary and is going on ahead, without our utterance to keep it company. From the back, it looks innocent enough, certainly not dangerous, like a slightly hunched, slightly

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