UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

TO LOOT TO HEW & EDEN

by

EMILY KRUSE CARR

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

JUly2010

© EMILY KRUSE CARR 2010 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition

395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaONK1A0N4 OttawaONK1A0N4 Canada Canada

Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-69475-6 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-69475-6

NOTICE: AVIS:

The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduce, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats.

The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission.

In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these.

While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis.

1+1 Canada 2

Abstract

to loot to hew & Eden is a lyric laboratory in which formal experiments in happiness take place. The collection is a poetic interrogation of what happiness is, how one comes to be happy, and how happiness—if it is even possible—might be sustained. The critical approach to loot to hew & Eden takes to happiness has been enriched by ecocriticism and feminism and their cultural critiques. This lyric laboratory contains three sections: "the story will fix you it is there outside your <&" 13 ways of happily: books 1, 2, 3 & 4," and "stories not about love." Throughout these sections, a young housewife relates the narrative of her attempts to place herself within the larger metanarratives informing her life: marriage, motherhood, adulthood, citizenship, and ecology. Inspired by Walt Whitman's "Songs of die

Exposition," I explore the housewife as the personification of American identity and destiny and as an alternative to the "all-American hero" (whom she is continually struggling not to fall for).

The formal experiments in to loot to hew & Eden are concerned with the relationships amongst genre, lineation, and punctuation. Each of the three sections takes a different generic shape: "the story will fix you" is a lyric essay, "13 ways of happily" is a sequence of lyric poems, and "stories not about love" is a collection of stories in the form of prose poems. In these generic experiments, I think about the ways in which lineation and punctuation reflect critically on the slippage between what the writer intends to say and what the words want to say and on the relations between interpretation and experience.

Finally, through my experiments with genre, lineation, and punctuation, I posit four ecological survival techniques that I see as central to the poetics of happiness: echo-location, ontological insubordination, animal attention, and language in heat. Through these survival

2 3 techniques, I hope to posit an ecologically-minded "happily" as an alternative to American happiness, which I see as endlessly optimistic, an insatiable conquering force that has relinquished the future for the great consuming frenzy of the now. Happily, in contrast, is a reorgankation of priorities that finds virtue in itinerancy, interconnectedness, accountability, and sustainability.

3 4

Acknowledgements

The individuals who have directly or indirecdy inspired to loot to hew & Eden are too numerous to list. Many of the poets whose work has been influential to my own are listed in the dedications to individual poems. I would like, specifically, to thank the poets with whom

I have worked over the past eight years: Tom Wayman, Robert Majzels, Sina Queyras,

Daphne Marlatt, Mark Cox, and Sarah Messer. I would like to thank a number of poets with whom I have had only brief contact but who have, none the less, been influential in my continued writing and research: Cynthia Hogue, Kadileen Fraser, Meredidi Quartermain, and Erin Moure. I would also like to thank Erin Wunker, who eased my introduction to critical theory and whose own contributions to feminist thought have inspired my own.

Finally, there are a number of poets whom I have not met but whose own work have made mine possible: besmilr brigham, CD. Wright, Forrest Gander, Fanny Howe, Ann

Lauterbach, Denis Johnson, Thomas James, and Frank Bidart. Thank you.

4 Dedication

Most importantly, none of this work would have been possible without Brad Carr. A simple thank you will never begin to express my appreciation.

5 6

Table of Contents

Approval Page ii Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 4 Dedication 5 Table of Contents 6 Epigraph 9

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION 1 1: to loot to hew <& Eden: experiments in the lyric laboratory 1 2: Nature Poetry vs. Poems of the Natural Sense, & besmilr brigham's Influence on My Work 5 3: "the story will fix you it is there outside your e>"; or, My Life as a Feminist: Autobiography & the Sexual Politics of Meat 21 4: "13 ways of happily": Echo-location & Ontological Insubordination 29 5: "stories not about love": Animal Attention & Language in Heat 43 6: Happily: The Experiment Continues 63

THE STORY WILL FIX YOU IT IS THERE OUTSIDE YOUR &. 65 ]all that other life as green blur[ 66 Jgirlhood replayed rewound a photogene simmering[ 67 jpolitics don't disappear they are going on inside[ 68 Jin the refined lawn of the lord's handkerchieff 69 ]who is the hero & was there a mother involved[ 70 Jfrom a wrong turn to the shock of understandingf 71 Jliving safely in the bright falsenessf 72 Jopen the door get out, climb over the guardrail, walk onto 73 the bridge where the wind tears a handkerchief to shreds [ Jgoodwife of sunset & muse of unmade beds[ 74 ]like the story leaving achilles alive abruptly in that way[ 75 Jstill life in a litde black dress & sprayon tan[ 76 ]mind out through the eyes[ 77 Jreality or, a moment poised before the in/everable—[ 78 Jback the same way go a new way spillf 79

13 WAYS OF HAPPILY 80 Book 1: the journal of elastic perception 81 draft 1, eye, white & spring 82 draft 2, & you know this is your fate to waver 92 draft 3, the flower of having passed through paradise in a dream 101 Book 2, an alphabet of gluing from misshapen wings Ill draft 4, the long fall to dirt heaven 112 draft 5, half a wishbone expressing with broken breast the truth 121 draft 6, dandelion to the instant 129

6 7

Book 3, secret histories of the vector 137 draft 7, scorned as timber, beloved of the sky 138 draft 8, her insides in a special receptacle 146 draft 9, in the meat of my functioning heart 156 Book 4, the art of the elegant integral 166 draft 10, caption for a miniature 167 draft 11, beserk coyote of the spring tense 175 draft 12, american destiny install'd amid the kitchenware 184 postscript, the chapel of the sparrow's body 193 draft 13, slope of the child's everlasting 194

STORIES NOT ABOUT LOVE 206 drama of the forfeit 207 ) a splitbrain grace note 208 ) adam was (not an old man 209 ) unbutton my ribs 210 ) the snake was a woman, she must have been: 211 ) the pour-usness of a passing ego— 212 ) the dream demands verbs— 213 ) alchemy & the soil of original/ sin 214 ) ellipsis, echo & psalm 215 ) no shepherd either, & must be is/ moving on 216 show & tell 217 ) on the first page of each new world's 218 ) forever prey to the eyes 219 ) salt of the unutterably/ human 220 ) what she said, what he said, before/ the fact— 221 ) & he—. in his cruelly bright— 222 ) whosoever has let a minotaur enter them or a sonnet— 223 ) no system of the vernacular 224 ) in last trapeze ecstasy 225 ) what only the birdgene remembers 226 scouts across america 227 ) on the stalk of an instant, unpetal 228 ) bearing the fiction of the white space that divides it, 229 ) in a world all broken out with Sunday,— 230 ) trying to be in love, ok 231 ) gravity, & the cellular life of leaves 232 ) more light—. more air—. something furious & beautiful— 233 ) his 72 hour human— 234 ) which is when in sthenic desperation,— 235 ) facts stem the haemorrhage— 236 amateurs 237 ) rot to the bottom soil of true belief. 238 ) in the spodess eyes of Sunday: oiled, amorous 239 ) like a goldfish in a gladbag 240

7 8

) & if hope returns it is another hope entirely— 241 ) as gracefully & ripe, to escape— 242 sunday goes on pulling one thing toward another— 242 ) like a greyhound pursued to static, 243 ) the song is a flexible spine,— 244 ) up the shinbone superlatives 245 ) you can leave your mark she thinks if/ you leave 246 cathedral 247 ) not beyond or beyond as after 248 ) between lives & before biography 249 ) thoughdess, a cocked revolver— 250 ...) gravity & skin make mannequins 251 ) which is when everything begins/ to hurt: 252 ) on the far right side of the beautiful left hand 253 ) a calculus in heaven adjusts 254 ) the body being such as it is like/ everyone else 255 ) sideways, hoping for backward— 256 state of grace 257 ) onomatopoeia of the ebbing— 258 ) one torn example 259 ) but to submit to articulation is the beginning of— 260 ) chemistry having its equations 261 ...) so you come to inhabit your body like music 262 ) cornfield testaments of the unwrapped dead 263 ) the riddle was: the slash in the middle/ 264 ) like the giant stones of macchu picchu 265 ) or to begin again 266 Works Cited 267

8 9

Epigraph

What is a poet but a person Who lives on the ground Who laughs and listens

Without pretension of knowing Anything, driven by the lyric's Quest for rest that never (God willing) will be found? —Fanny Howe, The Lyric

9 1

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

1: to loot to hew <& Eden: experiments in the lyric laboratory

to loot to hew & Eden is a lyric laboratory in which imaginative experiments in happiness occur. That is to say, to loot to hew & Eden is a book of poetry that is concerned with the formal shapes happiness might take. The collection is a poetic interrogation of what happiness is, how one comes to be happy, and how happiness—if it is even possible—might be sustained. The critical approach to loot to hew & Eden takes to happiness has been enriched by ecocriticism and feminism and their cultural critique. This approach is a fortunate accident. When I started this project I would have labelled myself neither an ecocritic nor a feminist. I am of the opinion of Rachel Blau DuPlessis, who said, "I am a feminist and a poet but not a feminist poet. I write enriched by feminism and its cultural critique but I do not write feminism in any straightforward way."1 I, likewise, would prefer not to be labelled.

I would simply call myself a poet and my work poetry.

I started this defense by saying that to loot to hew & Eden is a lyric laboratory. I do not intend to come down on any one side of the unwinnable arguments our century and others have fought over the lyric. Rather, I want to celebrate the lyric as a genre of and about impossibility and difficulty, as a form of expression that might take any number of shapes. I prefer the lyric, as Fanny Howe writes, as "a method of searching for something that can't be found... [as] an air that blows and buoys... [saying] 'not this, not this' instead of 'I have it'" {Wedding 21). I prefer it as logic that wants to sing, a song that wants to be heard by that

DuPlessis made this statement as part of a plenary on future feminisms at the Lifting Belly High: Women's Poetry Since 1900 Conference at Duquesne University in 2008. 2

most logical of all animals, the human, to loot to hew & Eden is a lyre strung on that tension:

logic, or song. It wants both/and/and.

At least, that is how I conceive of the lyric. That is the form of expression I mean

when I say to loot to hew & Eden is a lyric experiment. I am not using "experimental" here in

the literary sense of work that opposes or operates on the margins of "conventional"

expression.21 mean experimental, rather, in the original etymological sense of experiri [to try]

andpericulum [attempt and peril]: experiment as individual engagement, as understanding

something by doing it. In the laboratory that is to loot to hew & Eden, "experimental" means,

as poet Ann Lauterbach has argued, "a willingness to risk failure, to make mistakes" (Night

Sky 9), to test out a number of hypotheses that might make it possible to turn the promise of

happiness into fact. I want to stress that I do not mean I am creating anything new—as

Lauterbach points out, "[t]he tradition of the new is a dangerous precedent" (10). I mean I

am putting what I know at risk in the hopes of apprehending what I do not yet know:

happiness. I mean I am trying to adapt, to test alternative ways of experiencing and

expressing the happiness that I have found heretofore inexpressible.

to loot to hew <& Eden thus involves re-molding the forms in which and through which

I hear the world and, in turn, articulate myself as bodi spectator and participant. I intend, for

example, the first section of my book, "the story will fix you it is there outside your &" as a lyric essay. It is the only section of to loot to hew & Eden that might be called "true." I intend

the second section, "13 ways of happily," as a serial lyric. I mean "lyric" here in the

I find terms like "mainstream," "conventional," "innovative," and "experimental" to be as troublesome as "feminist" and "ecocritical"; they imply a margins/centre or primary/secondary dichotomy that is faulty and a disservice to both halves of the binary. These are, nonetheless, the terms currently in circulation and will, for the purposes of this defense of my work, which is not intended to enter into the current debate about the divide in contemporary North American poetry, be used. 3 conventional sense of short, intimate, lineated poems that, true to the form's oral origins, invest equally in sonic and semantic sense. The third section, "stories not about love," is—at least by my definition—stories. Although lineated, they are written not in lines but in sentences.

These generic classifications are inspired, largely, by Anne Carson, who refuses to

"choose" and "instead allows herself the freedom to do, as much as possible, whatever she might please" (Macklin 24). Indeed, as Susan Macklin relates:

In a public interview at the PEN American Center, her [Carson's]

interviewer, Michael Silverblatt, a Los Angeles literary critic, asked Carson—

first thing—how, exactly, she determines what form a piece of writing would

take: "poem," "essay," "novel in verse" et cetera. Pausing only briefly, she

answered, "By sense of smell." (24).

How do I know "the story will fix you" is an essay while "13 ways" is poetry and "stories not about love" is fiction? Because I believe form is a matter of temperment, of "rare and original idiosyncrasies" (Graham 146). As a mode of organization, an assertion about how experience is rearranged, and an address to an as yet hypothetical audience or "other," form is a kind of kinaesthetic mind. It is a way of taking responsibility for one's subject and of choosing how one moves in the world. Poet Kathleen Fraser writes, "[pjerhaps one's

'poetics'—or formal exploration—should be entirely tied to one's urgencies, wherein a writing practice may align its chanciness with the life being lived" (Fraser and Pritchett 80).

In this defense I will outline the critical methodologies behind the formal experiments I have chosen to make in to loot to hew <& Eden. In the second section of this introduction, I explain how my writing has been informed by ecocriticism. In the third 4 section, I talk about my work in relation to feminism's cultural critique. In these sections, I talk about both what my work is and what my work is not. I hope, thereby, to avoid the dangers of proscription. Though, for example, labels like "ecocriticism" and "feminism" make our conversation possible, both terms are—like the self—"constructed across a multiplicity of discourses, positions, and meanings, which are often in conflict with one another and inherendy (historically) contradictory" (de Lauretis ix-x).

In the fourth and fifth sections of the introduction, I discuss in detail how ecocritical and feminist theories intersect in the lyric experiments that take place in the three sections of to loot to hew &Eden: "the story will fix you," "13 ways of happily," and "stories not about love." I hypothesize four ecological survival techniques that are integral to my own exploration of happiness: echo-location, ontological insubordination, animal attention, and language in heat. I suggest these techniques as strategies for relinquishing our anthropocentric privilege at the center of perception and expression and learning to live on more ethical—and, by extension, happier—terms with die ecologies of which we are a part: the bulldozers and birds, asphalt and islands, leather coats and cows.

Throughout my explanation of the choices behind "the story will fix you," "13 ways of happily," and "stories not about love," I also chart the evolution of happiness into happily. Happily, I argue in the sixth and concluding section, is not only a mode of thinking, a state of mind, or a trope for exploration—happily is a lifestyle, a way of being in and as and of the world that makes it possible to live in the universe one chooses. My lyric investigation of happiness aims for what Paul Shepard calls the "healthy union" of integrity and relatedness: an affirmation of the self s shared metabolism with the world, an affirmation that involves intellectual openness. 5

2: Nature Poetry vs. Poems of the Natural Sense, & besmilr brigham's Influence on My Work

In "Prism," Louise Gluck writes, "the riddle was: why couldn't we live in the mind.

// The answer was: the barrier of die earth intervened" {Averno 26). Now, when we are just beginning to recognize and understand our role in destroying die environments of which we are in fact only a part, we need to remember how to live as creatures in, as, and o/"nature. At a time when the dismal consequences of urbanization are everywhere inescapable, I believe that one of the ethical responsibilities of imaginative literatures is to show not only that there are better ways to be human but also how there are better ways to live as humans. The eco- critical work in to loot to hew & Eden is thus equal parts ecology and ethics: in other words, eco- ethical. If, as Aldo Leopold has argued, ecology is the science of communities (viii), then an eco-ethical poetics is intimately involved in the ethics of community life: revisiting the "old paradigms of what Melville called our mortal inter-indebtedness" in order to rc-instil a reverence for relations rendered invisible and/or inaudible "in the scale of human prejudice"

(Rasula 1). An eco-ethical poetics calls on the imagination in a truly re-creational capacity, as an active force that reorganizes the ecology of the mind3 and rearranges our lives so that the future we choose is the one diat becomes a reality.

In to loot to hew <& Helen, eco-ethical means a return to the common things of the everyday ecologies of which I am a part: grasses, sparrows, dandelions, cows, frogs, clouds. I agree with Robert Duncan, who argues that the modern mind has "chickened out on the

Gregory Bateson defines the ecology of the mind as the relations of our individual (human) minds with the larger (natural) mind of which we are only a subsystem (467). 6 common things of our actual world, taking the properties of things as their uses & retracting all sense of fellow creaturliness [sic]" (32). My goal is not to sentimentalize or to anthropomorphize these "common things," but rather to instil a sense of fellow creaturliness. I emphasize the common things so as to unseat homo sapiens as conqueror and return the human self to its natural role as a "plain member" of the biotic community

(Leopold 204). My hope is to re-articulate what it was like to be a child, when happiness was a powerful combination of work and play, when the binaries "nature" and "culture" were still without meaning, and when poetry held allure because, as American poet Brenda

Hillman writes, there was still a disequilibrium between self and world, subjectivity and reality ("Seam" 99). Consider, for example, the following lines from "13 ways of happily":

"unchristened unclarified / every hour accidental a child & a chicken play tag in flight / from the everchanging it—." (Carr, to loot 86). "It"is a hybrid state, not human or animal, but both/ and I and: a way of living that connects one thing with some other thing, to produce a new third thing. What's most important here is not the fact of the flight but that the flight is shared by the child and the chicken. In the context of this poem, the "it" refers back to the

"young housewife forging myth in the kitchen" (82) as well as gravity throwing "apples from the trees" (83): in the short, the metanarratives of domesticity, scientific theory, and religious faith that, as the child grows and the chicken is slaughtered, prescribe what is proper and

"fix" the adult within societal norms. Flight is thus a return, out of worldliness and back to earthliness. What is described in this quote is not—like adulthood—a state of being so much as a process of becoming, of coming together. It can't be labelled; it is not an encyclopaedia 7 entry. It is evidence we can only, in moments of temporary communitas4 with the common things of our world, glimpse.

This investment in temporary communitas and in hybridity (which I will discuss in more detail later) leads me to reject the terms "nature poetry" and "pastoral." I am of the opinion, as is Gary Snyder, that "nature description is a kind of writing that comes with civili2ation and its habits of collection and classification" (21). I believe, like Snyder, that there are other ways of thinking about the natural world and probing its workings that do not rely on our anthropocentric predilection for naming and categori2ing. I would, moreover, argue—as CD. Wright does in her introduction to besmilr brigham's Run Through

Rock—that in my book there are "poems of die natural world not in the pastoral sense but in the natural sense" (n.pag.). I interpret poems of die natural world "in the natural sense" as texts that displace the human from its privileged position as "the crown of creation, the source of all value, the measure of all things" (Seed 35) and put it back in its place: as, literally, no more dian a flake of skin in the long history of the earth. The earth indeed would not mourn our passing—it has gone on before us and will continue on long after we are gone. We are, as the young housewife in "13 ways happily" later says of God, "just a contraction in the plot, like salt / grains drying on the neck's edge of sea—" (Carr, to loot

119).

Poems of the natural sense, then, practice "intellectual humility" (Leopold 200) and enact the shift from self as individual to self as community. Though I do not want to digress too far into what my work is not, I do want to distinguish myself from nature writing that

4 When I say "communitas," I am referring to Victor Turner's notion of commmunitas as "'a perception of shared emotional states [...] a direct, spontaneous and egalitarian mode of social relationship" (131). 8

treats the world as a mirror and ecology as, simply, environment (which leads too easily to

land as commodity). Because our anthropocentric bias is so deep-rooted, is learned, in fact,

from childhood, it is all too easy to fall prey to species arrogance. For example, in "The

Spirit of Rivers," John Daniels—a "nature writer" whose life and work I usually admire— writes "[a]nything in nature reflects the viewer, but of all the natural forms, rivers give back the fullest reflection of the human" (Far Corner 89). Though Daniels is trying to return our attention to the earth, he is fact treating the river not as ecology but as environment: "as some periphery or backdrop to our lives—rather than the stuff of our very bodies" (Macy and Brown 149). The river is mutely "out there," an empty receptacle we will fill with a better version of ourselves.

I appreciate Daniels' respect for the land; however, his statement epitomizes my problem with nature writing that presents "the human subject meditating upon a natural object-landscape-animal as a doorway into meaning of the human subject's life" (Durand

59). Though such writing purports to cultivate compassion for or appreciation of nature, it

"screens a symbolic appropriation of the land" (Robertson 298) and falls prey to the dangerous assumption of land as commodity.5

It is precisely this quality of reflection and this sense of displacement that leads to my discomfort with the pastoral. Like Daniels' statement, the pastoral signals a turn to the land but for what purposes? In the original Greek sense, the pastoral "is about one kind of life, one kind of person, but is intended for an audience of a very different kind" (Baker 136).

Traditionally, the pastoral concerns shepherds but rarely—if ever—does it directly address

Leopold discusses die dangers of treating die land as commodity extensively in A Sand County Almanac. 9

the shepherd on whose behalf it purports to speak. The pastoral is—like Daniel's river—a mirror. As such, it dabbles in voyeurism of a very dangerous kind. It is this double life—

the assumption of privilege that allows one person to assume not only that they can see their own human nature reflected in another but also that they can speak on behalf of that other—that makes possible the escapist tropes of "refuge, reflection, rescue, requiem, and reconstruction" (Sales 17) that are still common in the contemporary pastoral. Consider, for example, Terry Gifford's argument that the contemporary pastoral can mean anything

"ranging from [the] rural, to any form of retreat, to any form of simplification or idealization" (23): anything, as Lawrence Buell points out, that "celebrates the ethos of nature over the ethos of city" (23). Pastoral becomes, in the other words, synonymous with

"nature poetry. All so as to, as Stanley Plumly argues, exploit the "tension between the actual and the imagined, the practical and the projected realities—between the run of unruly nature and the domesticating pace of a cultivated, nurtured nature" (152).

My poetics does inherit from the Romantic pastoral the belief in the power of the imagination as a force of change, an investment in freedom of form, and faith in the primacy of the feeling function.6 It diverges, however, from the Romantics' search for complex integral unities or imaginative wholenesses inspired by the "notion that man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil, is the center and pivot" (Santayana

106). Which is not to say I am not influenced by the Romantics' still-dominant strain of nature poetry. I am, indeed, inspired by it. The Romantic pastoral tradition is my Minotaur: in my case, crippled or crumpled, never slain. At best, one of my poems crawls forth,

This reading of Romanticism is inspired by Jerome McGann's I he Romantic Ideology. 10 wounded—never intact and rately heroic. I do not intend to compare myself or my writing to the Romantics and their genius. Their attention to the natural world was timely, and necessary. At the birth of the modern city, the Romanic pastoral offered "a haven, a refuge, a place to grieve, perhaps to heal, a place to think, to meditate, and a place to be de-educated and retaught" (Baker 139). On the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, we needed the

Romantic pastoral to model ways of focusing on a "natural" Self.

Now, however, we aren't sure anymore what Nature is—city zoos? National parks?

The dwindling African savannahs? Or is the only true "nature" left in the icy reaches of

Antarctica? The tenet of Nature as the symbol of the spirit, of natural history as aid to supernatural history, will no longer do (Lazar 37). to loot to hew &Eden is thus dedicated to divorcing the shepherd from the bestial and the poet from the divine, Eden from idyll and the "real world" from civilised. It hopes to reverse the grammatical transformation by which a process is turned into a state, a tiling: my goal is not happiness but happily? Not pastoral or nature poetry but nature as verb: naturing, de-naturing, un-naturing, re-naturing the human as it goes. The activity of opposing fact-making and self-fashioning with inquiry, opinion, wonder, doubt: wandering that is in dialogue with the world. Why? So as to find virtue in itinerancy, happily not in what the storyteller thinks she wishes life to be, but in the story that comes to her and enables her telling.

I am inspired to these pursuits, to a large part, by besmilr brigham's ecological

Southern feminist poetics. There are remarkable similarities, echoes, over- and under-tones between my work and brigham's, who wrote most of her published work in the 1960's and

As Claudia Rankine writes, "The noun, happiness, is a static state of some Platonic ideal you know better than to pursue" (7). 11

1970's and who stopped writing when she died at the turn of the twenty-first century— precisely when I started writing poetry seriously. I imagine, had we known each other as children, we would have been bosom friends based on the simple fact: we like the same things. So perhaps "inspired" is not accurate. There is a camaraderie, affinity, and kinship in our work that transcends the bonds of cause and effect, before and after. We are, it seems, in some kind of chicken and egg situation. For example, we share an interest in idiosyncratic marks of punctuation like the open-ended parenthesis and the virgule. We are suspicious of terminal punctuation. Neither of us seems to setde—on a single form, a single line, a single subject, a single home. We are loners, we love cats, we live with our husbands in a state of constant dishevelment at a remove from the rest of the world. We talk better to a poem than a person. Our relations with the world, from a distance, likely seem slapdash, slaphappy. At the end of her life, brigham lived with coundess cats, botde-fed calves, a library stored in abandoned appliances, and her husband in rural Arkansas. I'd be happy, I think, if that's what happened to me. WTiich is what I mean by "remarkable"— it's not just her poetics, it's her.

Is it crazy to say I aspire to be like this woman who stood alone at the center of her world and wrote? I had no idea she existed, let alone that she was a poet or what kind of poetry she wrote or what kind of a woman she was, until after over three-fourths of to loot to hew &Eden was already written. I first read heaved from the earth, the only book she published during her lifetime, a mere two weeks before writing the first draft of this introduction.

Later, I read Kim Through Rock, a posthumous collection of her short poems edited by CD.

Wright. The rest of brigham's manuscripts exist only as plastic black binders tided with nail

My knowledge of the particulars of brigham's life is indebted to Wright's introduction to Run Through Rock. 12 polish, saved thanks to her husband Roy's diligent record-keeping and Wright and Forrest

Gander's felicitous interest at the end of her life. For now, I can only imagine the kind of poetry these binders might contain and what I might learn and who I might come to know from reading them.

From what I have read, however, I am more inspired by brigham than any other writer I have yet come across. She goes straight to the top of the list: past Thomas James,

Mary Ruefle, Denis Johnson, Juliana Spahr, Larry Levis, Emily Dickinson, Joy Williams,

Raymond Carver, Daphne du Maurier, Anthony Burgess, Daphne Marlatt, Anne Carson,

Fanny Howe, George Saunders, John D'Agata, and Ann Lauterbach, to name a few. I aspire to her anomalous, fiercely independent, unconstrained, and wildly ethical approach to the relationship between a poetics and a life. I aspire to her ability to be, in the endless dimensions of the moment. I think that Ron Silliman is wrong when he says that she is just an observer, "passing through and taking notes" (n.pag.). I don't think brigham's peripatetic lifestyle prevents her from being truly present, in the present.9 In fact, I think that her work exemplifies a curiosity without epistemology, which is truly generous. By "curiosity without epistemology" I mean throwing oneself beyond "what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with other sides of things that we do not sense direcdy" (Abrams 58).

Curiosity without epistemology articulates a universal ethic of the feeling of responsibility for a diverse range of lives, both human and natural and living and non-living (and particularly the non-living): from "wolves crying to empty sky and earth" (Run 2), to a baby lizard learning "the quiver quiet / flesh-way / earth-instinct circumference" (15), to an old land-

9 With her husband Roy and her daughter, brigham migrates, for example, from Arkansas to Alaska to New Mexico to Mexico to Nicaragua to Mississippi, and even, occasionally, to Canada. 13

owner "like a stiff bud pecan" (19), to mountain ridges spread "like weeping dinosaurs" (25)

to "the pliable whole woman / digging a knife thru" (31), to her mother "screaming to the

eagles of her mind" (49), to the moon "hard as a gutted calf (52), to "a catjoy sharpening its

claws" (59) to "the joy of the rock / that is past the joy of the shaping of the rock" (59).

Curiosity without epistemology means breaking free from the species arrogance our Western

society has inculcated in us from birth; it is a way of experiencing and articulating the world

that does not rely on human intelligence and imagination as the ultimate measure of value.

I think this kind of epistemology is possible because, until the end of her life,

brigham refuses to settle. It is this "homelessness" that makes her landscapes not, as Silliman

argues, "tentative," but just the opposite: animated, with a life neither solely inhuman nor

solely super-human nor solely un-human nor solely human. Life, in brigham's poems, is

community life, and not community in the human sense. Rather, it is her displacement from

human society that makes it possible for her to enlarge the bounds of articulation and

expression to include rocks, birds, dinosaurs, mountain ridges, lizards, wolves, moons.

Perspective is literally itinerant. It is, indeed, itinerancy that gives brigham the remarkable

tonal range Silliman later praises: "You can see & feel all of her directions, but never quite

sense the presence of an overwhelming unifying force" (n.pag.). brigham is not unifying but

she is there, aroused to a maximum alertness to the collectiveness of life. She has not found

herself at home in the world in the traditional sense of owning the land, or of working the

land, but rather by re-imagining herself as part of it.

Part of this arousal happens through a syntactical flexibility that promotes

simultaneous, collaborative (and not competitive or mutually exclusive) meanings, brigham's poems push punctuation and the parts of speech it regulates to increasingly expressive ends. 14

Open-ended parenthetical phrases spill over into the next line, or maybe even off the page,

"leaving it to the reader to decide at what point the digression ends" (Gander 35). The thought finishes off-stage, somewhere just past earshot. The open-ended parenthesis is thus

"an elliptical escape from stasis" (Macklin 9), forming not meaningful events but "pre- meaning (or silence) events" (Hillman, "Cadenced" 175). For example, in brigham's "heaved from the earth," a poem that describes the coiling of a snake as a tornado heaves it from the earth, the open-ended "(they do / immediately from danger or when hurt" (brigham, Bain

31) inserts an element of chance, surprise, accident—literally enacting the coiling of the snake as it is heaved. The virgule in this quote serves the poem in lieu of a line break or caesura. "Such punctuation," as Hillman argues, "has nothing to do with resting but with the sorrow of choice. Why not start a new line? The slash in the middle of everything, is why; the non-existence, is why" ("Cadenced" 184). brigham and I prefer punctuation in, to borrow from Joan Retallack's The Poethical Wager, in medias mess, that's why. We are suspicious of ending. We do not prefer it. We would rather our poems hang, open-ended, reminders of the "wordlessness" that surrounds and shapes our "verbal passage" through the world

(McHugh 277).

In to loot to hew & Eden I use the open-ended parenthesis and virgule similarly: to disrupt chronology, to fragment the progression of events, to frustrate cause and effect, and to undermine the reliability of the book's narrator, the young housewife. The parenthesis in the lines "(then it was fall: or no, it was summer / ending, there are statues & fountains, ruthlessly carved, / plastic bags in palm trees (now again, trees," for example, is intended to create tone of voice: a stuttering, uncertain effect, perception—like the coiling of the snake—as it happens, in medias mess (Carr, to loot 140). The parenthesis means to act as a 15 dispossession of intellect that opens up new ways of articulating the world the young housewife assumed she already knew as well as opening up the narrative the reader assumed was to be followed. The open parentheses act accumulatively, layering break upon break, inserting endings and beginnings within the line. The convention of continuance is constantly queried and amended. Is the narrator reliable? Stricdy speaking, no—but she is reliable to the best, however, of her abilities. The deliberate use of "incorrect" punctuation aims to illustrate the structure of internal resistances and uncertainties that prevent her from knowing either her own experience or the world completely.

brigham and I are also sceptical of standard grammatical practices and prefer, for example, to work freely with the hyphen, hyphenating nonhyphenated words and vice versa, stringing modifying words together without hyphens. (Following the German, I tend to smash the adjective halves together, frustrating the "proper" grammatical function of adjective and noun: "spaghettistrapped," "childsafe," "hellbent," "lobstercoloured,"

"fishbelly," "jeweltoned" are just a few examples, brigham, on the other hand, leaves them separated, though her own first name is a kind of linguistic fusion of her given names "Bess" and "Miller.") We rarely write in whole-sentence constructions. We prefer a "vipering, fanged, and headless sentencing" (Wright n.pag.). We want words to "fall onto the page a litde out of order, without their attendant complexes of articles, transitions, predicates..."

(Gander 36). Or, as brigham writes in "Through Fields of Fog and Trembling Winds,"

"(words/ with words / beat/ with wings beak feathers" (Run 75). Why? So as to free language from meaning that is rooted in the anthropocentric, to relocate expression at the limits of the solely human, to re-render the human, as I write in ")the snake was a woman, 16

she must have been," "(struggling (in fact) & not/ with one's existence" (Carr, to

/oo/212).

The momentum of my open-ended parenthesis is not as physically forceful or as aggressive as brigham's; while hers conveys the heaving of a tornado, mine suggests a more

subde shift in our habits of perception. My poem continues: "the grassblades touch & touch

& in their small distances, the / myth beings: / as family life, as skin one lash by lash undreaming—" (Carr, to loot 212). This poem is undreaming the myth of Genesis and the single-minded pursuit of human uniqueness and environmental control that is so often read as God's gift to Adam. The parenthesis employed earlier in the poem hopes to split open the story we think we already know and to relocate the roots of an appreciative understanding of the animal in ourselves in the beginning, in the Judeo-Christian myth of duality and authority that helped to create the ego boundary between human and animal. So it is that the only

"human" implicated in my poem is the snake. The potential actors in the poem's "family life" are "an astonished moon," "black angels," "small birds," "gloomy begonias," "white cucumbers," and a "ruined scarecrow" (212). The open-ended parenthesis thus, like brigham's, divorces subject-object relationships from tiieir implied destinies. In the question

"who acts" a whole range of consciousnesses and creatures are implicit.

Which is to say that die grammar of our poems is not inaccurate or unconsidered or anarchic or chaotic. Our poems certainly may seem, on the surface, erratic and eccentric.

The punctuation, capitalization, and syntax are, nonetheless, deliberate, brigham's poems quite intentionally end without terminal punctuation. The lack of closure underscores expression as a process that proceeds through experience, that is never finished, that can never accurately or finally re-articulate the world. The poem wanders off, back into the 17 world; it is not a closed system but interpenetrated and extended. Similarly, when I end a poem with an em dash period, I am suggesting that the story continues on, without you or me, beyond the capacity of words to narrate events. My poem ") alchemy & the soil of original/ sin," for example, ends with the line "at a certain point he will say now/ I am ready—." (Carr, to loot 215). Like so many of our "real-life" conversations, the words on the page circle the poem's "true" subject, endlessly, relendessly pacing the perimeter of what happens next, pushing the narrative into the realm of speculation, of process and possibility rather than fact.

brigham and I like our oddly punctuated, queerly stated poems because they model

"a kinetic choreography attentive to organism" (Rasula xi), not humanism. Our poems are ecstatic; they perform "an outpouring of self in order to make I / a receptacle of what /

Everything has" (Dorn 60). Ecstasy is not a state of being but, rather, is a process of identification that proceeds through relation. Ecstasy opens the self to the chaotic universe, corrupts tame [i.e. civilized] with mid, and is a way of becoming with the many we (humans) have named, catalogued, and categorized in the world around us. Ecstasy is itinerant, unsettled, in between. It is a mode of perception and expression that refuses to stand still, that is constandy in motion that, by virtue of its in-between-ness, is truly earthly.

My use of the word "ecstasy" here is inspired by Christian mythology, which is a dominant part of the culture in which I was raised. Though I have been able to discard many of its beliefs, it is impossible for me to completely un-know what I learned as a child. There is, moreover, much that the Christian New Testament's vision of ecstasy can offer ecological thinking: generosity, empathy, humility, compassion, and fellow-feeling (Kittel, Friedrich, and Bromiley 217-9). In addition to illusion, possession, bewitching, prophecy or prayer, 18 ecstasy can mean astonishment and, as a way of apprehending God, has both positive and negative connotations (218-9). Ecstasy is closely related to the verb existano or existemi, which means to remove from its place and to alter, shake, confuse, bewitch, or set in terror (218).

Intransitively, these verbs can mean to remove oneself, to lose one's wits, to go out of one's mind, to be terrified out of one's wits, or to be beside oneself (218). In Mark 3:21, after performing healing miracles, Christ is accused of being ecstatic or "out of his mind" (218).

Later, in 2 Corinthians 5 in a letter to the young Christian church, Paul and Timothy write that if we are ecstatic—out of our mind—it is for God (219).

The ecstasy that I read in brigham's poems and that I aim to perform in my own is similar to the Christian concept, but without the requirement of a belief in God and without the emphasis on the apprehension of divinity. In our poems, ecstasy reveals the self ennobled and extended so as to free subjectivity from egocentricity and possessiveness, which will make a responsible relationship with the ecologies of which the self is only a part possible. Consider, for example, brigham's wolves with "eyes open as stars," {heaved 25)

"deep woods feathers... stained hard as jungle leaves," (13) a snake lying "quiet as a root buried under," (12) and ants like "tiny cinders of moth wings" (11). Under brigham's attentive, empathetic, generous ear, figurative language does not re-inscribe the sylvan world but rather explores the interpenetration of self and world, brigham's poems, specifically, give up the ambition to "be somebody" so as to suffer with the earth. Her poems apprehend a world "diurnal, nocturnal, broken," (Wright n. pag.): a world full of "nails and ghost,"

(brigham, Run 43), of green jonquil spears "under layers of/ matted dead" (39), of soft "bird drowned eyes" (37), old hens and left old men "carving out intricate snake heads of war"

(25), women who hang their pretty smiles from the bedclothes, the bloody hide of a 19

butchered goat, birds like "big black angels in the sky" (20), a "dead world awake" in escaped

nerve gas (16), a water moccasin heaved from the earth and choosing to "die by its own

mouth / pushing the fire thorns in" (1). Each one says, simply and the same: "I am / love

me" (32).

Finding happiness in brigham's poems involves a fundamental shift of values. It is

more than simply a pleasurable feeling; it is, rather, about choosing a lifestyle that makes

life—not one's own life but life in general—possible. In reading on and on and on brigham's

body of work, I begin to understand better what I mean when I propose to find "happily"

rather than "happiness." Originally, the tide of the second section of my dissertation, "13

ways of happily," was a blend of Wallace Stevens' "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and

Lyn Hejinian's Happily. The tide simply sounded "right" and so I settled upon it, knowing

that later I would begin to understand why. I will return to a discussion of "happily"

throughout the rest of this introduction, so what I offer here are only preliminary thoughts,

as I did previously on page four. "Happiness" is a state or condition; it refers to good

fortune or luck in a particular affair; it results from success or attainment of what is

considered to be good ("Happiness"). "Happiness" can be achieved by hard work, self- determination, and sacrifice. "Happily" shifts focus from utility to probability, emphasizing luck, chance, felicity, and happenstance ("Happily"). Specifically, my work explores

"happily" as a fortunate process that reframes the relations between the supposedly

"external" environment and the "internal" human ego into a system of interpenetrated ecologies. Inspired by brigham's poetry, I experience happily by suffering with the world, by reaching inside me to "[...] the / place where the / world is breathing" (Kabir 72). 20

In "the Valley of San Miguel," brigham illustrates the difference between

"happiness" and "happily" when she describes an old land-owner, "hound of the valley," as

[...] like a stiff bud pecan with all leaves shook off he is a wilting sprout, the mesquite cleaned of its beans blooms

in its own black wholeness

we left him locked in his own wonder

how silent the fields are growing food. (Run 41)

Happiness is the old land-owner locked in his own wonder, dreaming of times that are not and blindly fleeing the time that is. Happiness tries to translate a process into a state.

Happily, in contrast, heaves, beats, taking pleasure, as George Sand has advised, in what one does not know and learning to love the exceptions (Sand and Flaubert 89). Happily finds virtue in itinerancy; happily comes not only from empirical experience and from nonlinear logic but also from a resolve to experience suffering as a constructive emotion that is needed to effect a substantial transformation of the self. Happily is a reorganization of priorities, a refusal to underestimate the self which—however important society and human relations may be—is "in, of and for nature from our very beginning" (Naess 20). Happily is thus, as I intend it, a happy version of Midas' golden touch: a simple wish that conjures up a reality that was all along potential (Howe Wedding 7). As I write in "stories not about love," it is

the dream [that] is moving, sometimes with you & sometimes with someone who is not you: 21

like strawberries spring from buffalo bone, scattering short champagne wavelengths of skin (from the inside out chaos/ begins, skin." (Carr, to loot 236)

3: "the story will fix you it is there outside your e>*"; or, My Life as a Feminist: Autobiography & the Sexual Politics of Meat

Two decades ago, feminist science historian Donna Haraway wrote, "[i]t has become difficult to name one's feminism by a single adjective—or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun. Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute" (155). As a young feminist thinker in the twenty-first century, I am indeed acutely conscious of exclusion through naming. Much of my anxieties as an emerging scholar revolve, in fact, around naming. The further I progress in my academic studies, the less interested I am in labelling myself. My work, both critical and creative, is increasingly invested in finding the maximum freedom within existing constraints: "constraints of any kind, socially imposed constraints of the existing language, the constraints of hostility, constraints of self (Macklin

24). With my ecocritical interests in mind, I would add to this list: constraints of humanity, constraints of intellect, constraints of spirituality, constraints of imagination, constraints of anthropocentrism, and constraints of the rigidly orthodox (whether religious or scientific). It is at the intersection of feminist and ecocritical theories that I find this freedom.

Specifically, feminism and eco-criticism intersect usefully for me in what, in her book of the same title, theorist and theologian Carol J. Adams termed "the sexual politics of meat." With its triple exploration of sex, politics, and meat, this theory critiques "what can be turned into bodies, what turns are taken in bodies, what ends up in bodies, and what bodies themselves end up as in the end" (Rasula 131). Adams' theory encourages an 22

attenriveness to the political and ethical dimensions of the discourses that displace women

and animals from being fully physically present. She asks us to consider, for example, how— very much like the word "environment"—terms like "chick," "hamburger," "bitch," and

"veal" relegate the actual woman or animal to some periphery or backdrop role. Adams'

theory hopes to motivate us to ask deeper questions about our real wants and needs when it comes to the consumption of animal flesh and the language uses we are willing to accept when talking about feminine and non-human creatures. She reminds us of the self-deception that is regularly practiced not only when ordinary, moral, conscientious people eat meat but, more importandy, when these very same people—and I include myself in this category— consent to labelling women with terms that "derive from domesticated female animals: cow, pig, sow, chick, hen, old biddy" (Carr, "Interview" 35). Whether or not we agree with her theory and regardless of whether we, too, have given up the practice of meat-eating, Adams illustrates die real damage we do to ourselves and the larger world when we go along with the dictates of pre-existing constraints.

In to loot to hew <& Eden, I am inspired by Adams to consider whether self-constitution or reconstitution as a personal and historical subject is possible within the constraints of marriage. Through the figure of the young housewife, I explore what modes of self- expression and, by extension, what selves, are possible within the pact of shared isolation that is marriage. Though it is often marketed as such, marriage is no lasting happiness; it is a legal institution that dictates codes of proper behaviour and privileges certain relationships over others. Marriage is also one of the primary ways we humans understand the self as larger than the individual ego. Marriage commits our existence to co-complicity with anodier being; one gets to know oneself not as a singular person but as part of a pair. Marriage is, as 23

such, one of the formal shapes identity might take. Paradoxically, marriage is both an

abandonment of self (as the woman, for example, assumes the man's name) and an

enlargement, enhancement, and breaking down of the barriers of self. This state of being

cuts both ways: for better and for worse. The challenge is, as American poet Cole Swensen

has argued, to throw one's personality wholeheartedly into the problem because "in

relationships, one finds a vital motion and the perspective from which 'things' cease to be

things because they are no longer static or finite, but are always changing according to

context. It's a perspective in which things reveal themselves to be, like Wittgenstein's words,

determined only by use" ("Artist's" 232). to loot to hew &~Eden takes up that gaundet:

marriage will be determined only by use, not by social standards and legal dictates.

Autobiography seems the natural place to start such a project, though the first

section of to loot to hew & Eden, "the story will fix you," is less a memory piece (the what

happened) than notes on what might have happened. Because I have been the primary actor

in events as they unfold, my perspective is inhcrendy skewed: my actions mean one thing in

the moment, another thing after the fact, and quite another thing entirely before they

happened. The narrative in "the story will fix you" follows these leaps as fast as it can,

though often it can't keep up. Much like that of Denis Johnson's Jesus'Son,10 the point of

view can't stay located in a single or singular time or place; the young housewife starts her

story in the present in a hospital; rewinds through the distant past of girlhood, the immediate

past of last night, and the even more distant past of Genesis; fast forwards to parenthood,

Jesus' Son is a linked short story collection in which a jumbled, a-chronological, and very often confused narrative is related from the perspective of Fuckhead, a junkie and alcoholic. Events—not surprisingly—fail to follow a coherent casual chain; as a result, readers' reactions are affected by the juxtaposition of, rather than the series of, events. 24

then settles briefly and uneasily in the present, which the young housewife shares with a very

loving husband; and then rewinds again and fast forwards, ending finally with the housewife alone in bed, dreaming of a story that "will fix you / in die sunseared air she thinks it is /

there outside your &" (Carr, to loot 80). In her attempt to settle on a coherent narrative of her self, the housewife leaves out more than she includes. She dreams of times that are not and blindly flees the only one that is—so that she never actually lives, and is always planning to be happy or remembering what it was like to be happy. She is as unprepared for happily as she is to tell this story, in which all her hopes and fears and dreams ricochet wildly between the words on the page and the wordless, encroaching white space.

This section is a lyric essay because sense accretes in fragments. The text borrows equally from the lyric's intimacy, density, and shapeliness and from the essay's sense of the quest (D'Agata and Tall n.pag.). The text is three parts imagination, rumination, and faith and three parts fact, perception, and observation (D'Agata and Tall n.pag.). The poems perch on the fence between imagined and felt, between willed and real. Like the parenthetical statements at the end of Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse, the open-ended brackets around the title of each poem in "the story will fix you" intends to suggest that the autobiography is woven of faith and fiction, an area of creative hybridity in which a number of truths mingle, vying for attention. According to standard grammatical rules, brackets indicate an interruption or a correction or create the possibility of polyvocality—another voice intervenes in the text. Brackets mark omitted or added information: something missing or something supplementary. The facts inside the brackets are needed for complete comprehension, but not necessary to the sentence. As Karen Elizabeth Gordon has pointed out in The New Well-Tempered Sentence, brackets tend to be scholarly marks of punctuation, 25

"used much more frequently in academic writing than in literary, causal, affectionate prose

(drama's one exception)" (124). "the story will fix you" is another exception: the brackets are

not scholarly but personal, a way of reckoning with the difficulty of ever knowing one's life.

Life happens, the open-ended brackets mean to suggest, as much in what we don't

attend to as in what we do in fact notice. The open-ended brackets aim to emphasize the

importance of gaps, of silence, of the unsaid and the unsayable. Indeed, if the poems in this

section are read, as I intend, as a sequence, then the brackets close around the body of the

poems so the telling itself becomes an aside, nonessential information, an insertion by way of

explanation or editorial remark. The brackets literally sever the body of the poems from their

tides, widening the gap between name and thing and signalling the story, and by extension

the self, as artifice, a conscious linguistic construction. Within the poems, the interplay

between white space, punctuation, and lineation is designed to mimic the structure of internal resistances that is the autobiographical mind. The poems in "the story will fix you it is there outside your &" thus draw attention to spatial passage—to the roadblocks the writer throws up that the reader must potentially negotiate en route from departure to arrival, beginning to end. The convention of continuance is queried; the autobiography is constantly ending. And restarting. And ending.

As a lyric essay, "the story will fix you" intends to remind "us of the wordlessness that surrounds and shapes the verbal passage" (McHugh 277) from experience to articulation. The poems in this section foreground their fragmentary nature so as to ask: how do we translate experience into the illusion that there is a coherent self who organizes the past into cause and effect? Is memory in fact more than

this strange autopsy surplus/ value painfully small endings shreds of emptying one more element in the truth's immense disorder (Carr, to loot 67)?

If emotions are no more than neurochemical transmissions, then what is this self we think we will lose by growing up, getting married, having kids?

These questions are, largely, inspired by the formal questions raised in Lyn Hejinian's prose poem autobiography My Ufe, in which she refigures autobiography as the fertile compost of a life that grows and goes to seeds and grows again while the poet talks herself across the complex topography of memory, family relations, middle class values, and suburban American life. The leitmotif "and as for we who love to be astonished..." echoes fifteen times across Hejinian's text and is paired with a peculiar mix of die fantastic or

"imagined" and the real or "factual." For example, the phrase "we who love to be astonished" is paired with die phrases "my heartbeats shook the bed" (Hejinian, My Ufe 29),

"every Sears smells the same" (46), "she pretends she's a blacksmith" (49), "a moth has more flesh than a butterfly could lift" (53), "there are fences keeping cyclones" (81-2), and "life is linked to man" (84). Repetition and variation push that one simple phrase "as for we who love to be astonished" to its expressive limits. As Cynthia Hogue and Laura Hinton have argued, "buried at the etymological roots of the word 'astonish' [...] is the capacity 'to stun... stupefy' an opponent, 'to shock one out of his wits... bewilder" (5).

"Astonish" thus implies a capacity to wonder, to take childlike pleasure in a state of not knowing and uncertainty, to remember what it was like to experience the world for the very first time. "Astonish" is an antidote to "argument"; it replaces logic with a method of searching that revels in the search itself rather than any answers at which die search might arrive. "Astonish" gestures towards beyond sense: the chaotic, sometimes incoherent fragments into which life often breaks down. And what, Swensen has asked, "[i]s the point 27 of pursuing beyond sense?" ("Artist's" 230). She answers: "Because sense simply does break down; we do find ourselves beyond it, and it's often dangerous and frightening. We need to know how to negotiate this zone, and how to transform it in cases of war and fear and grief into something that won't simply overwhelm and destroy us" (230).

I agree wholeheartedly with Swensen, and to Swensen's list of reasons for "pursuing beyond sense," I would add because of suffering. Suffering goes hand in hand with astonishment and pushes our rationality to its limits. To get to know oneself ultimately involves getting to know one's suffering. Any conversation about who one is, where one is, where one has come from, where one wants to go, and how one's life should matter will lead to that very astonishing emotion which is suffering. In to loot to hew <& Eden, god, angels, churches, faith, Adam and Eve, and song are all images of my suffering. They act as objective correlatives—the concrete representation of the abstract concept that is suffering.

Though it's difficult to pinpoint the dates exactly, it took approximately six years for me to lose completely the Lutheran faith in which I was raised. It's taken me another six years to write back into that wound. When I think about giving up on God as the central pivot of my life—the rationale for who I am, how I act, where I have come from, and where I hope to go—I am suffering. Much of the writing in this book is thus a matter or urgency and is duende-driven: not an attempt to heal but rather to investigate my relationship to my wound, to explore the transformative potential of suffering.

It's all too easy, once one arrives at suffering, to shut down and stiffen resistance to what seems to be too overwhelming, too complicated, too out of our control. It's too easy to turn from astonishment to apathy. Yet we do real damage to the self we are in search of when we refuse to negotiate this zone. Throughout the poems in "the story will fix you" the young housewife confronts—or perhaps, more accurately, is confronted with—this dilemma. To know her suffering or to ignore it. She is tempted to turn away and become something other than her suffering self:

she begins to undress

all her clothes seem shiny-souled the change was automatic I she said I

to prove she is not me not that you may not be anyone anymore alone herself along unspoilt unburdened buoyant even (76).

She is searching for a story to replace the one she has relinquished. It is this refusal to accept her wound and to know her suffering that lands the young housewife in the emergency room in the first poem in "the story will fix you." She has not understood that it is her suffering that makes her human and alive. As I re-read "the story will fix you," I think also of the Greek ololygcr. "a ritual shout peculiar to females... a highpitched piercing cry" uttered during sacrifice that signals "either intense pleasure or intense pain" (Carson 125). I hear ololyga in "this raw hope weeping / with gratitude for the frog," (Carr, to loot 71),

the sun flingfing] blood across the windowpane, rippling

as she turns come unstuck from the swim the horror that is tomorrow (76),

Persephone wandering "in the delusion of her body" (77), Eurydice dying "for the second time / breathless & aroused her body humming" (Carr, to loot 80). 4: "13 ways of happily": Echo-location & Ontological Insubordination

In "13 ways of happily," the second section of to loot to hew &Eden, I think about four ecological survival techniques: echo-location, ontological insubordination, animal attention, and language in heat. Like Adams' theory of the sexual politics of meat, these survival techniques bring together issues of gender justice and issues of animal rights. They are in search of a sustainable consciousness and, to that end, are intended to cultivate a sense of universal responsibility across our assumed species of being: man/woman, human/animal, culture/nature. Shepard has argued that "ecological thinking requires a kind of vision across boundaries," as well as an "appreciative understanding of the animal in ourselves which our heritage of Platonism, Christian morbidity, duality, and mechanism have long held repellent and degrading" (2). I think his use of "appreciation" is apt—we can never know "what it is like or what it means to be any other kind of creature than we are" (6). We cannot define the experience of being of an other—whether that other be a woman, an animal, or a plant.

Poetry is thus a particularly apt discursive mode in which to explore these ecological survival techniques. The intelligence at work in poesis can be inherently exploratory and speculative. The language of poetry does not have to be, as the language of science must be, one of equivalences and substitutions, in which each term has been agreed upon and

"written across an equal sign" (Gander 9). Poesis does not result "from an accumulation of information but from the maintaining of a continued plasticity of response [...] to new information" (Cobb 123). Because poetry puts so much pressure on each individual word, each mark of punctuation, each bit of white space, the art form reminds us to slow down, of the need, in this time of environmental degradation and species extinction, to give our 30

thoughts time to gestate so we can imagine our roles in creating a better, more sustainable

future.

The challenge of sustainability is, I believe, renegotiating the shortfall between the

imagined and the real. The world is suffering and we are the cause of it. The fact should rivet

our attention and bond us to collective action, but it doesn't. Why? Most of us continue to—

to various extents—to go along with the communal deception. We continue to see ourselves

as separate from a plant or an animal, "as an isolated sac, a thing, a contained self, whereas

the epidermis of the skin is ecologically like a pond surface or a forest soil, not a shell so

much as a delicate interpenetration" (Shepard 2). We are, as Paul Shepard has argued, hidden

from the problem as well as from ourselves by our patterns of perception (1). How we

experience the world and how, in turn, we articulate those experiences are still dictated by

deep-seated dualisms of mind (self) and body (world). The ecological survival techniques I

am proposing are intended to disrupt such "stock" versions of self and to interrupt false

metaphors of "contest" and "conquest" that have dominated human's interaction with the

environment.

When, in the first draft of "13 ways of happily," I open with the young housewife

"forging myth in the kitchen," (83), I am thinking about why, as Ruth Hubbard has asked,

certain ways of learning about nature [both human nature and Nature] and using that knowledge are acknowledged as authoritative and others not [Politics 32). I mean to offer the young housewife as an alternative to Adam/Orpheus,11 the kitchen as an alternative to the

I think of Adam/Orpheus as figures who, through words, make knowing possible, for, as Shepard writes "it was Orpheus as Adam who named and thus made intelligible all creatures" (8). Both, moreover, are figures of banishment and exile: Adam from Paradise, Orpheus from woman. As such, the myths of Adam and Orpheus lie at the roots of my primary theoretical concerns: ecocriticism and feminism. 31 scientific laboratory (as the sanctioned site of fact-making), and poetry (as orally transmitted knowledge, experiments, and observations) to Genesis (as a myth authorized by official culture). Poetry enacts a reconceptualization of reality and reorganization of knowledge: an

"ecstatic / anarchic release into the commonplace: the very thing (as / foetus) and object // of enjoyment (amore propre) disoriented in the whitehot air" (Carr, to loot 84). The question this poem investigates is "who has the social sanction to define the larger reality into which everyone's everyday" experiences and perceptions must fit "in order that one can be reckoned sane and responsible" (Hubbard, "Introduction" iii). The young housewife is not, strictly speaking, sane nor is she responsible; all her effort is bound up in a childlike relationship with the ostensibly "external" world: she struggles to reconcile her sense of discontinuity ("an awareness of the self s unique separateness and identity") and her sense of continuity ("a renewal of the relationship with nature as process") (Cobb 126).

In the poems that follow I employ echo-location and ontological insubordination to creatively deform and reform the housewife's experiences and perceptions so as to depict the enlargement of her burgeoning sense of human individuality to include the self s total relationship with the world. Through a practice of echo-location and ontological insubordination, I hope to articulate a nonanthropomorphic position: the "ability to see and think in terms of process as well as in terms of myth and allegory or personal drama" (Cobb

130). Echo-location is about where one is in the world and how, knowing one's environment, one will choose to live in, as, and o/"that place. Ontological insubordination is about who one is and how, knowing oneself, one will act in relation to the social and ecological structures within which one's life happens. Together, these survival techniques 32 imagine a more ethical self that is relational, accountable, and attentive to interconnectedness amongst disparate life forms.

More specifically, echo-location is "self-location of where, in the deepest sense, one is in the bio-sphere" (Martin 103). Echo-location is a way of disconnecting ourselves from our dependence on sight and reconnecting with the larger circuits of which our seeing self is merely a part. The technique asks us to perceive the world like our distant relatives the porpoise and the bat: through sounding and re-sounding, a complex process of integration and differentiation. The basic gesture is listening. I translate this gesture onto the page as white space. Everywhere the visible (audible) text is hedged about by an invisible (silent) text.

Stanzas float in a sea of mute ether, unmoored from logical or narrative assumptions.

Stanzas are connected through a loose web of associative tissue that is constantly shifting, making space for further interpretation. The ratio of white space to stanza in these poems focuses the eye and ear on individual words, on parts rather than wholes.

Consider, for example, die following lines from "draft 13, the slope of the child's everlasting.":

smeared with a litde

green dis/ integrate morning strings the stippo with

shiny moonbits a stump echoes trunk,

blossom diigh, butchered bone wry as a

flute (Carr, to loot 196) 33

The lineation is intended to mimic the motions of bats or porpoises sounding out the

interconnected net of things that is the world. The text can be read in extracts from the two

columns, as two separate poems: "green / shiny / blossom / flute" and "smeared with a

litde / dis/ integrate morning strings the stippo with / moonbits a stump echoes trunk, /

thigh, butchered bone wry as a." Or the text can read left to right and down the page, as a

single poem "smeared with a little / green dis/ integrate morning strings the stippo with

/ shiny moonbits a stump echoes trunk, / blossom thigh, butchered bone wry as a / flute." Finally, the lines can be read across, as self-contained sentence fragments:

smeared with a litde," "green dis/ integrate morning strings the stippo with," "shiny moonbits a stump echoes trunk," "blossom

thigh, butchered bone wry as a," "flute." Despite a reader's expectation of left-to-right, line-by-line provision of meaning, the poem refuses to settle on any single,

"correct" reading.

My intent here is to perform process thought, which is particularly difficult in the

English language. As Shepard points out, the noun and verb organization of the English language "shapes a divided world of static doers separate from the doings. It belongs to an idiom of social hierarchy in which all nature is made to mimic man" (5). The insertion of white space between words potentially opens grammar up to the turn at the root of "verse" as well as the making at the root of "poesis." As the caesura moves back12 inside the line, paradoxes emerge; we can't, as we would like, fill in the blank "along customary lines of seeing or saying" (McHugh 278). For a moment, we must abandon our habit of literal translation and let the words move in unexpected directions. 34

By altering the bounds of sense, the poems in "13 ways of happily" demonstrate the

possibility of altering the bounds of our objective reality, of enacting the processes of

integration and differentiation that free the self from false reification and open it up to the

phenomenal world. In, for example, the first draft of "13 ways of happily," the young

housewife re-emerges: "oblivious in excess fish in the air begging for sea / soul in the gap

between" (89). She ends the poem "intimate at last, on the tremolo / near wingtip," "root to leaf of now," asking "from time to time do we all / go through this dissolve" (92). The poems that follow enact this dissolve, a process by which the skin-encapsulated ego is

extended further and further beyond its purely human identification to re-connect with earthly ecologies. The "you" in these poems is not imperative but rather a way of straddling inside and outside, like an amphibian with wings and fins, lungs and gills, belonging equally to both worlds.

What the young housewife realizes she needs is another perspective, an alternative to the limited autobiographical "I" of the collection's first section, "the story will fix you." To counter the metaphoric construction of identity and agency, this hypothetical "I" on which we focus our instincts for self preservation, the young housewife must achieve a "you" that, neither singular nor plural, has enough flexibility to slip out the window, past the Rockies' chalk outline, and spill, a "solo joy note," through "crumpled spandex sun car / murder noise dioxidedrunk sugarmaple & soon too / sparrow chorus wild in the beautiful, young grasses" (95).

The young housewife's search for a more ecological subjectivity navigates the human

(manmade) to the natural and back again, settling somewhere in the middle where the

I say "back" because the embedding of die caesura widiin the line was quite common in Anglo-Saxon verse. 35

housewife does not necessarily come to know herself but rather opens and expands so as to

hear nature's eye on her. She is both spectator and participant, culpable but not, necessarily,

in charge. She comes to occupy a collaborative space that is larger and more fertile than

herself alone. This is, I would argue, a happier state—she has not lost or abandoned herself

but, rather, has become more of who she really is by freeing herself from the false reification

of the subject dictated by self-interest and the need for self-approval. She comes to see

herself as "only a small part of a much larger trial-and-error system which does the thinking,

acting, and deciding" (Bateson 331) and she is thereby liberated from the desire to delineate

and defend the boundaries of the autobiographical "I." She begins to realize that happily is

not located inside us nor can it be created by us. Happily, rather, exists at "that pregnant

zero point where the illusion of ego is lost and the world, no longer feared, is re-entered with

compassion" (Macy 61-2). If she wants—and she does—to experience happily, she must

learn to appreciate the both/and/and position: not self surrender or a loss of self but self as relation.

I approach happily from the belief that one does not, as Jed Rasula has argued,

"change the world—a futile repetition of the Prometheus complex—but change the mind that conceives, and accedes to, that composition of the real we acknowledge as world" (62).

After echo-location, the challenge is indeed one of ontological insubordination: can one at the same time know and free the known of ontology? Can one liberate the ego cogito from the ego conquiro, so that the nature/culture, self/other, and human/animal binaries are no longer a

"subsidiary fleet of orbiting satellites around the trinity of language-knowledge-law" (Rasula

34)? After all, as Australian environmentalist John Seed argues, "We find that though we may be able to discard some of the beliefs of the culture into which we emerged, changing 36

the self imprinted onto us from the moment of birth requires work. Our self was molded by

this culture, and tremendous energy is needed to effect substantial transformation"

("Introduction" 11). The transformation, in other words, must first take place on an

individual level; it is not the world but rather perspective that lies at the roots of continued

and seemingly unavoidable environmental costs of "progress."

Ontological insubordination is one strategy for effecting this transformation. It

challenges the young housewife to treat any tangible form meeting her gaze as an

experiencing subject, to imagine what she might learn about herself and how she might, in

turn, live once she accepts that she is also read by what sees her. Ontological insubordination thus makes possible a reciprocal animation of self and world through the medium of logos, which is, as Joan Retallack has argued, "an environment—[...] one of the many environments we live and breathe in—part of Nature/Culture enjambed" (267). The final three sections of "draft 3, the flower of having passed through paradise in a dream" illustrate this process of reanimation:

11 ... the dandelion bites its tongue on the green hardness grow ing inside against the hum of luminous doves you strain forward, hoping...

12 brilliant, scalped dreaming the hero's sleep—a god who made, it said, the world

13 which way would you have come this way, delirious & shredded sailing sideways through the greenly ravished vowels (Carr, to loot 110-11)

"Tongue" embodies the dandelion with speech; "hum," similarly, confers the power

of communication on the doves. The "you" of the final section of the poem can thus be

read as the human "you," as the dandelion, as the doves, or as the god "who / made, it said,

the world." The "greenly ravished vowels" open out into otherness, sketching possible

relations amongst the things of this world, so that the "you" of the poem ends by interacting

with the dandelion, the doves, and the god, rather than separating the human out as a single

separate species with a unique ability to express the otherwise mute ecologies of which it is a

special speaking part.

It is this transformation that opens up the signifier "you" in draft 4: "you are of three minds: like elegant grasshoppers / tearing each other to pieces in the unleavened dandelions dreaming / of someone not born yet someone who will change your life—" (Carr, to loot

115). The unit of survival expands beyond the merely human, to include the overlooked and unvalued "pests" of our everyday world—grasshoppers and dandelions. The "someone not born yet someone who will change your life" might be human—or not. In these lines the individual "you" that speaks rejoins the environment, replacing herself or itself or himself into the long history of evolution that has, with its "death-defying feats of flexibility" (Naess

37), produced not the single human consciousness but many possible consciousnesses.

In "13 ways of happily" I explore the formal model of the "draft" as a way of engaging with this "multiplicity and situatedness" of the subject: the knowing self that is always partial and never finished, and dius never immediately present (Haraway 192-3). The unique, singular self at the heart of the Socratic axiom "know thyself is, I believe, a mydi; it, 38 as the young housewife declares in "draft 1, eye, white & spring," "can only be called by what it is not" (Carr, to loot 83). Without context, "die" self is nothing. The challenge is not autonomy but to "link up with the social ecological fabric" (Iijima and Retallack 256). Thus, the draft. The draft is, like the French roots of "essay," an attempt: tentative, speculative, nondefinitive, turning inquiry inward, from argument, information, and facts to thinking

(D'Agata 9).

This is what I mean by eco-ethkal. Environmental philosophers and activists—such as Gregory Bateson, Joanna Macy, John Seed, and Arne Naess, to name only a few—argue that the reification of the self is basic to our current planetary crisis. Macy, for example, writes:

[tjhe crisis that direatens our planet, whether seen in its military, ecological,

or social aspect, derives from a dysfunctional and pathological notion of self.

[...] It is the delusion that the self is so separate and fragile that we must

delineate and defend its boundaries; diat it is so small and needy that we

must endlessly acquire and endlessly consume and that as individual

corporations, nation-states, or a species, we can be immune to what we do to

other beings. (152)

The belief that consciousness—and, by extension, selfhood—is unique to the human species is, I think, problematic. The challenge, I think, is not to relinquish the self but rather to approach human existence, as in Buddhist practice, "as a precious opportunity to wake up for the sake of all beings" (Macy 57).' Through the form of the draft, I make die choice to return consciousness to die body's sensory participation in the collective and connective field of experience that is the world. I choose to revise my role as a human, to accept my

ethical responsibility to listen to how the "exterior non-human objects neglected as subject"

(Durand 59) might inform who it is I am in the process of becoming.

Because the poems in "13 ways of happily" are intimately concerned with the body's

sensory experience, they occur in seasonal rotation: book one, drafts one through three,

happens in spring; book two, drafts four through six, happens in summer; book three, drafts

seven through nine, takes place in fall; and book four, drafts ten through twelve, takes place in winter. The postscript, draft thirteen, comes full circle, back to spring. In the first draft of happily, I consider happiness from a domestic perspective. In the second draft, I turn to the biology of hope, with a particular emphasis on sexual reproduction. In the third draft, I investigate evolution, Manifest Destiny, and the politics of space. In the fourth draft, which begins book two, I explore original sin, sacrifice, and redemption. The fifth draft delves into

"the sexual politics of meat." This draft makes the most explicit connections between feminist and ecocritical theories. Draft six, which serves as seasonal turn (from spring and summer to fall and winter), returns to domestic politics, verging on the autobiographical in its exploration of die speaker's middle class Midwestern childhood. The mydi of self decomposes: "which one are you/ & who would know—." (Carr, to loot 137).

The young housewife has come to a point like no other in her story: she is, finally, relearning the importance of wonder and of wandering. She is beginning to straddle reality and imagination, self and world, experience and faith: that which we can clearly see and that which we can only begin to apprehend. She leaves book two widi a healthy dose of

This interpretation of Buddhist thinking is elaborated in Macy's World as hover, World as Setf. 40

scepticism towards her humanness. The illusion of permanence and of privilege is no lasting

happiness; it will be taken from her, finally, as all lies are.

The third book of "13 ways of happily" starts with the seventh draft, a kind of

coming-of-age story that reimagines a duende-driven version of William Carlos Williams'

young housewife. I am thinking of duende as, as Garcia Lorca writes, that force which loves

ledges and wounds (n.pag). Duende refers to the omnipresent loom of death and is, as such,

phenomenological: at the heart of duende is "the body and its dangers, the heart and its

constancy of harm" (Brock-Broido xiv). In the eighth draft, that takes place in the "o-shaped

cement block diat is St. Agnes'," die story briefly intersects with the "reality" of "the story will fix you." The young housewife returns to the hospital, where, in die first poem in "the

story will fix you," god had wandered "through the waiting room, pick[ed] / up a crushed

dixie cup, stethoscope, a shoe" (Carr, to loot 67). But with this difference: die focus turns

from the mind to die body, with its "desire for rain & razor blades..." (Carr, to loot 155). The

source of the housewife's despair is not reproductive (social) but sexual (biologic). Draft nine turns to male-female relationships, mining die myth of the negligee as a possible symbol of the housewife's duende. The tenth draft, which starts book four, explores that insoluble dilemma, individual guilt, through the drama of Eden. My interest in the story of original sin is two-fold: myth, as Gluck has argued, was invented "to explain the drive of two beings toward an animal pact of shared isolation, the drive to make of the body a souvenir or proof of the event" and also to create "narratives designed to account for what would otherwise be inexplicable suffering" ("Forbidden" 251). The eleventh draft alludes to die personification of American destiny in the figure of the housewife in Walt Whitman's "Song of the

Exposition" so as to consider die politics of American happiness. 41

I see American happiness as endlessly optimistic, an insatiable conquering force that

has relinquished the future for the great consuming frenzy of the now. As Macy writes, "this

[America] is still the land of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale, where an unflagging

optimism is taken as the means and measure of success" (96). Or, as Tyrone Cash explains:

When the frontier was over, when there was no more empty land, no more

unexplored territory, the engine of American ambition had no place to go.

What we have done, and elected Ronald Reagan to stand as symbol for, is to

cancel the future. [...] Thus, it became morally permissible to treat the lands

we live on and the rivers and the soils and the forests much as we had treated

them when we knew there was an unlimited open frontier in the West for us

to move to when the lands we were exploiting were exhausted, destroyed,

befouled, (qtd. in Macy 175-6)

American happiness—static, unyielding, obsessed with its purported "democracy"—is only

one of the myths the housewife must free herself from. It is, however, a particularly

powerful myth and one she will continue to struggle with throughout the rest of the

collection.

Draft twelve explores, to this end, the housewife's weakness for the myth of the "all-

American hero." This draft is a kind of happy ending. It is as close as "13 ways" can get to

the Hollywood version of happiness. Draft thirteen is a kind of encore in which duende returns, undercutting the ending proposed in draft twelve. Draft thirteen leaves "13 ways of happily" hanging, at the turning point or climax of the young housewife's search for a more ethical and more ecological and thus happier self. The "slope of the child's everlasting" in the title refers both to the housewife's own childhood and to the aborted foetus of draft 42

eight. "Your tomb" may be the child's, the housewife's, or the mother's. Regardless, the

"I"—for better or for worse—is reborn.

I think this is appropriate because at the heart of happily and the question of an eco-

ethical consciousness is the problem of the simultaneity of one's self and the witness who is

one's self, of expanding one's human consciousness while at the same time articulating that

transformation in human terms so it can—at least to some degree—be understood by the

rest of the species. I am particularly wary of the alarm and the sermon as forms of writing

that dictate, criticize, dole out portions of blame, insist on black and white, either/or

solutions, and thereby inculcate apathy. We are all co-complicit. If there is an answer to our

current ecological situation it cannot be absolute; the answer, like the formal model of the draft, must be revisionist, generous, and self-correcting. The shift from "I" to "you" and back again enacts this process—not self, not other, neither right nor wrong, but both/and/and. The bio-anatomy of "13 ways of happily" is thus one of instability and temporary, reversible transfiguration; it does not offer up a self but rather is a record of mutilation, fracture, and multiplicity that breaks both out and inward, leaving the trace of the search for an identity and a world.

In this section of to loot to hew &° Eden there is a conversation of beginnings and fragmented middles, no endings. The poems operate on ah axis of quotation and recombination. Words like "wing," "grass," "fish," "bird," "frog," "gravity," "meat," and

"song" surface, resubmerge, and surface again. Bird: as prehistoric, as song, an essentially musical ambition. Grass: as American, as leaves, as manicured in the suburbs, as the long song of Whitman's democratic hopes. Frog: something reaches us from the deepest realities—the marine world. Dandelion: a deeply personal image, Ray Bradbury's Dandelion 43

Wine as a metaphor for childhood, when ambition and selfhood were possible, this dream

the housewife has been trying to kill. Gravity: makes flesh possible. Meat: the absent

referent, what is and isn't there, the essence of our animality deboned, filleted,

shrinkwrapped, roasted, fried. Song: the out-of-tune church-crowd noise of childhood, the

turning of Orpheus in the underworld. Song is connection; it is about the body: lungs,

breath, ears, the limits of what can be made physically intelligible. It is the form of

expression by which I am coming home, returning to the Midwestern America of which I

will always, to some degree, be a part. Singing evokes childhood for me because it is the only

time I belonged to a mass of people joined in expression; adulthood marks for me a loss of

faith and, as a consequence, the end of song. I was raised in a community of German

Lutherans who settled in the Midwest to avoid conscription in the Prussian Army so "song" to me means church, which means German-Lutheran farmers, which means "home." The end of "13 ways of happily" is thus both a death and a re-birth; I send the young housewife to the limits of her suffering, which is the memory of childhood and the only place she ever, really, belonged, which she relinquished as an adolescent without having any notion of the consequences or having any real sense of where she thought she was going.

5: "stories not about love": Animal Attention & Language in Heat

"stories not about love," the third section of to loot to hew & 'Eden, temporarily leaves the housewife behind to explore a diverse cast of couples. What seems on the surface to be a diverse cast of couples, however, is meant to be, like the characters in Virginia Woolf s The

Waves, facets of a single consciousness. There are not discrete, singular selves but rather a composite self. Identity becomes collaborative and relational, subject to continual revision and renegotiation. These characters do not exist in a dialectical world of subject and object,

self and other, fact and fiction, and art and reality. Instead these characters are intended to

depict reciprocity, interconnectedness, a shift away from the self as "ordinarily understood"

towards the self as "only a part of a trial-and-error system which does the thinking, acting,

and deciding" (Bateson 473).

As such, "stories not about love" turns to myth and fable as forms of insight that are

equal parts wild and tame; as forms that celebrate hybridity (in the form of "fabulous

creatures" like centaurs, sphinxes, mermaids, and minotaurs); as forms in which birds, lead,

and rocks can speak; and as forms that begin in hope and end in death (but not hopelessly).

Though they have wildly different endings, Grimm's fairytales share a common beginning:

"in the olden times when it was of use to wish for something..." (Rabkin n.pag.). The prose

poems in "stories not about love" insert themselves after the ellipses in the phrase "when it

was of use to wish for something" and into the fabulous world of fairytale. As such, they are

saturated in sensory perception, mey are disinclined to use self/human as a measure of

experience, and they transpose the world of talking animals, libidinous gods, and chivalric

knights onto our twenty-first century world. They aim to create a present world ecology

stirred with old ways of thinking about what and how it means to be human.

Myth, Fanny Howe has argued, is like Midas' golden touch: a simple wish that

conjures up a reality that was all along potential (Wedding 7). Not necessarily a better world,

simply a possible world. Myth is a re-animated world in which, for example, a god can wander

through these stories "making frantic music inside icebergs" (Carr, to loot 247), having "his way with a girl" (243), and arguing with the devil (237). Myth is a world in which it is plausible for the divine to be phenomenological: not orchestrating the complicated score 45

that is reality but simply a single part of it. God is, in fact, the only character in "stories not

about love" who is singular—who has no other or mate who might make self-definition

possible.

God in these poems is senseless in the double sense of the word: without the

capacity to reason, with a child's sense of wonder and penchant for play, without a plan, just

being from moment to endless moment; as well as mute, deaf, dumb: lacking sensory

experience in the human sense. Which is not to say that the god of "stories not about love"

does not experience the world; rather, he models an alternative process of perception that

does not, as the human's, rely almost solely on the eye/I. His passage through the world is

like that of a child acquiring language: "a powerful and pleasurable combination of work and

play" (Mullen 284). He is a fickle, capricious, sometimes responsible but more often

irresponsible, and rarely benevolent figure. As he surfaces and re-surfaces throughout

"stories not about love," god is "thundery, drunk" (210); god eats sun (216); "vague &

beautiful the godchild ricochets like a bat or the black planets," (221); god "walks lightning

naked" (212); god argues with the devil at a stoplight, begging him to leave eve alone; god

has his way with a girl: "she is like sweet white butter & he is / so coy shebang" (243); god

"makes frantic music inside icebergs" (247); god "drinks/ in the dark, like people / or

flowers" (255); god "rises, his long eyes flecked with clouds. / he is mad but wont say. sings/

out of the side / of his mouth (259). This is a god that is not accountable— or that, consciously or unconsciously, fails to recognize his accountability. He refuses to offer a coherent master-narrative that will provide the context in which life can function in a meaningful manner. He is not, in other words, an answer. He is simply one in the cast of characters. I conflate myth with fable because I believe, as Robert Duncan states (as I note on

page six above), that "the modern mind has not only chickened out on God, on angels, on

creation, but it has chickened out on the common things of our actual world, taking the

properties of things as their uses and retracting all sense of fellow creaturliness (sic)" (32). If

myth is a way of re-apprehending the divine, then fable is a way of re-apprehending the

ordinary. In "stories not about love" I return to the "common things" by limiting the human presence in the narrative. The human is not, necessarily, the protagonist, whose needs,

desires, and ambitions drive the story. Rather, the human must vie for attention with

chickens, astonished moons, grassblades, birds, wild cats, insect choirs, howling trees, drugged cows, clouds like wildebeest, cornfield testaments, squashed angels...

Consider, for example, ") the pour-usness of a passing ego—.":

jaguars slip through midnight hedges, waving, like a cadenza or a crocus, watery molecules of dew disperse, you are marble & salt, trailing rusty knifeblades of wing. a constellation scalped, salt of the unutterably—. crimson clouds looking like cattle flower & expire. the pronoun softens/ like a stem, your heart makes a

wooden sound, pumping—. (213)

The world and the "common" things in it are so much more than a backdrop to the human action. The ostensible environment of the poem, rather, consists of constandy shifting interrelationships between the "you" and jaguars, molecules of dew, constellations, crimson clouds. The pronoun literally "softens," by which I mean the pronoun becomes part of the community rather than the "speaker," not re-telling the tale but rather contributing to the ongoing conversation the world is having about itself. 47

This is why these stories need to shift perspectives—and pronouns—so often and so

quickly. The pronoun confusion is a syntactical way of dealing with the simultaneity of

oneself and the witness to oneself. The pronoun confusion also attempts to model an ethics

of community life that is constandy amended, remended, and unmended. The pronoun

confusion has, like fables, a moral in mind: un-stitching and re-stitching dualisms like "man"

and "woman," "culture" and "nature," "divine" and "earthly" that make the anthropocentric

ego possible. The focal point of view is not a given but a dilemma: perspective, like the

narrative, is continually beginning and ending. And beginning again. Quite purposefully, the

narrative does not "belong" to any one particular perspective: the plot, rather, is communally

shared. It is not "my" story or "his" story or "your" story but rather "our" story: a site at which many voices meet, converge, diverge, and re-join, only to be broken again. These

stories want to break "open the lock of dualism (it's this or that) and peer out into space

(both this and that)" (Howe Wedding 15). Any overarching narrative (that might, for example, assume the status of "metanarrative") is a constant negotiation amongst the speakers who might, potentially, voice it.

Formally, "stories not about love" is composed of six stories, each of which is composed of nine subtided prose poems. The prose poems in each story are separated and subtided (rather than numbered) to indicate that they should be read together but need not necessarily be read sequentially, following the narrative conventions outlined, for example, in

Freytag's pyramid. Rather, the stories are to be read like a book of poetry with multiple sections: each section is a discrete unit, but within those sections, readers may, in effect, choose their own adventure by deciding which poem to read first, second, third, and so forth. 48

If read straight through, the first story, "drama of the forfeit," starts in the second

person "you," shifts to the third person "he," returns to the second person "you," blends the

second and third person "you" and "he," and finally ends with the first person "I." The

second story, "show & tell," adds "she" and "they" into the mix. The third story, "scouts

across america," introduces the possibility of no pronoun reference and a narrative point of

view that is removed from and simply observing the dramatic action. In the fourth story,

"amateurs," "we" appears as a potential point of view. The stories continue to ricochet from

pronoun to pronoun, until, finally, the last poem in the final story, "state of grace," settles on

"we" who approach the trees in "our distorted bodies" and "take a further step inside that light without etiquette or / influence other than this green hunger—." (267). Overall, the dramatic shift in "stories not about love" is from the "you" and "he" of "drama of the forfeit" to a "we" that is more than the individual people and includes more and more of the phenomenal world: a flight of spotted turkeys, fleshly warbling clouds, crickets beating their thighs, the grass stirring, a sparrow singing, the first beast making its entrance, the treeline thrashing itself out among the lighteating leaves, the jaguar of sweet laughter (267).

Significantly, the only reference to humans in the final poem is in the "something proposed then forgotten: holy ghost / where does it come from this/ desire, in the throat of language" (Carr, to loot261). Language, however, quickly transforms into "the glorious unstrung light of June, while the jaguar of sweet laughter—." (267). It is thus, in the end, not the human that speaks but rather the human that is re-absorbed into an articulate world. These stories are, indeed, not about love but rather about relation, about when we can finally turn to our world and see the beauty that is there despite our being there. In fact, as Fanny Howe writes, "its beauty can finally be seen because we aren't there" (97). We have

resumed our proper place as just another part of the fabric.

In these stories, I explore animal attention and language in heat as a way of

reapprehending the beauty of the world from a less anthropocentric perspective. Animal

attention is about how perception happens. It opposes the hominid separating the natural

out of himself. Language in heat is about rearticulation, both in the linguistic and the

biological sense: word and joint, speaking and bending, a mouth and an ear and an elbow

and a knee. Together, these strategies aim to articulate "emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual

experience in forms neither self-serving nor predatory" (Gander 45) so as to engage in

Frances Ponge's "joint dance of being, breeding respect and response in the flesh, in the run,

on the course" (83). And then to ask us to "remember how to live like that at every scale, with all partners" (83). Animal attention thus enacts the post-structuralist idea of decentring

the human subject.

In "stories not about love," one way I perform an animal attention is by exploring the intersection of nature and culture in the environment that is language. My intention is not to oppose human and animal attention but rather to investigate areas of overlap, to think about hybrid (rather than binary) possibilities. I invest in hybridity in the literary sense of work that blends characteristics associated with "conventional" or "mainstream" writing, such as "coherence, linearity, formal clarity, narrative, firm closure, symbolic resonance, and stable voice," with those characteristics generally assumed to be "innovative" or

"experimental," "such as non-linearity, juxtaposition, rupture, fragmentation, immanence, multiple perspective, open form, and resistance to closure" (Swensen xxi). I also—and perhaps more importantly—approach hybridity from the original biological sense of the 50

Latin hybiida: "the piglet resulting from the union of wild boar with tame sow" (Partridge

300). The root of the word "hybridity," as Clayton Eschleman has argued,

stresses that the incongruity of the fusion derives not from different species

[as the terms "conventional" and "experimental" suggest] but from the

intermingling of wild and tame state. Translating these states into

anthropological terms, it defines aspects of both shamans and witches whose

identities and activities are comprised of wild and tame, or wilderness and

cultural, experience. (150)

Indeed, the wild tameness or tame wildness at the heart of the hybrid is what makes it such a particularly apt formal model for the kind of attention I want to explore. In, for example, the Lauscaux cave paintings that are the subject of Eschleman's Juniper Fuse, the hybrid is a fusion of the human (cultural) and the nonhuman (natural). In "stories not about love," die hybrid contests the absolute and traditionally confident line between human and nonhuman on which tropes like personification and anthropomorphism depend. I use animal attention as a way of resisting the kind of psychological takeover that happens when the human is projected onto the nonhuman as well as to reassess language as a means of connection rather than a barrier between humans and the world around them. Animal attention is also a way of resisting the very anthropocentric assumption that nature educates us; animal attention, rather, acts as a reminder that, as Susan Stewart has argued, nature "is beyond our frames of time and space and the categories of our understanding. [... ] Nature is the undefinable, unlimited resource out of which knowledge arises just as invisibility lies beyond and behind the visible—not in some mystical way, but as a real acknowledgment of the limit of our powers, analogous to the finitude posed by our individual deaths" 51

(Thompson n.pag.). Animal attention performs this acknowledgment; as an ecological survival technique, it intends to illustrate the finite limits of our human frames of perception and articulation.

Consider, for example, how animal attention functions in the opening poem, ") a splitbrain grace note.":

imagine it: fleshlyness. in the soul marrow, wingsong. leapfrog slingshot see (like eve throwing apples sideways from the trees. gravity curls the fernstalk, a red wind licks your elbows, in current downriver singing the ocean grows, smoke bellies the flagpole. slimankled oaks dream in soil. he goes ahead coatless lightsoaked. breathing in folds, like a fish, he deals all his selves (was it a rib or catgut

like the corollas of a dying sun how/ brilliant. (208)

In the title, "splitbrain" refers to our human mind and the long-held model of self "that splits into binary oppositions in order to privilege intellect over emotion, the subject over the body, 'masculine' over 'feminine,' culture over nature" (Nielsen 129). The autonomous perceiving subject is, however, to be undercut by "grace note," which intends to reduce the binary intellect to a kind of ornamental superscript performed as an afterthought or a supplementary aside, the duration of which is brief compared to the rest of the composition.

The body of the poem, likewise, moves away from the human subject, which is displaced to a secondary speaking position on the back half of an open-ended parenthesis. The first parenthesis in this poem underscores Adam and Eve's shared separateness; the mark of punctuation literally enacts the line between human and nonhuman. The human is, however, repositioned as an afterthought to fleshlyness and wingsong. Neither Adam nor Eve speaks; 52

language, rather, sounds in the wingsong, the singing ocean, and the slimankled oaks

dreaming.

I open "stories not about love" with a return to Genesis, to that pre-lapsarian state

before the Fall, because I want to start all over again, at a time when biological

interdependence was a matter of survival, and rewrite, from the very beginning, the notion

of the "autonomous male individual who transcends history and society" (Nielsen 127). It is

in Genesis that my feminist and ecocritical concerns intersect in the question of agency:

"that is, the question of where action can originate if the subject is dismanded" (136). The

transcendent masculine ego is, literally, dismanded as, in the last two lines of this poem,

Adam sheds his selves "like the corollas of a dying sun."14 The play on sun/son is

intentional: it is intended to gesture towards the sacrifices made by God's son, Christ, to

remedy the consequences of Adam and Eve's sin. Adam's fall is not merely into physical

hardship (toiling as he farms the land to grow the foods that were once readily available); the

Fall also signals a mental decline. Now that Adam is not longer "master" of the earth and

must compete on more equal footing with other creature for survival, Adam must reconsider what the assumed privilege of being created in God's image actually means.

The following eight poems intend to continue a "lash by lash undreaming" (Carr, to loot 212) of the myth of superior, disembodied, boundaried human selfhood as told in the

first book of the Old Testament. When Eve encourages Adam to eat the apple, at stake is more than knowledge. At stake is a levelling of value between subject and object; I am

The references to Eve and to the rib are intended to qualify the "he" in this poem as not any "he" but rather as, specifically Adam. My sense of "deals" in this quote is closely related to the dealing of cards; just as the dealer passes out individual cards, Adam "sheds" his selves. 53 thinking here of Eve (first woman, born of and named by Adam) as the original "object" or

"you" and Adam (first man and namer) as the original "subject" or "I." From this union (at least according to Judeo-Christian mythology), all human subjects and objects are conceived.

Thus, when Eve argues, "one self [...] is not the way/ to live," she means that "self is neither solely object nor solely subject (Carr, to loot 2\5). Indeed, the poems in

"drama of the forfeit" resist the first person singular until the final lines of the seventh poem, in which "I" appears as "grass or dead, a stick figure on atom's edge, de/composing—." (217). The title of the sequence, "drama of the forfeit," becomes a matter of self; "I" is forfeited as Adam & Eve flee the garden; the overwhelming subject-being is left—from the very beginning of "stories not about love"—behind. The stories to follow are thus not about love, at least in the human sense of a mutual dependency that is limited to two human beings.

The animal attention approach to experience makes language in heat possible. "We are," as Tvestan Todorov writes, "accustomed to conceiving of communication as only interhuman, for since the 'world' is not a subject, our dialogue with it is quite asymmetrical

(if there is any such dialogue at all)" (97). The world thus perceived becomes an unresponsive object that forecloses its possibility of true dialogue. Animal attention is the necessary act of dispossession that precedes language in heat: it is "alieniloquiam, unnaming the privilege of the human as it goes" (Rasula 8). Animal attention has its root in the drawings of Lascaux or in American Indian15 tales, in which "one perceives a mysterious

1 Because so much of to loot to hew <& Eden is concerned with dismantling American ambition and optimism, I am purposely using the "American" term here when, as a "Canadian"—at least according to my current residence—I should be using the terms "First Nations," "First People," or "Aboriginal." 54 understanding between men and other living creatures which bespeaks relationships beyond our imagination, infinitely remote from our analytical capacity" (Santillana 346). It is mythical or fabulous in the sense of re-immersing articulation in the material, temporalized universe and in returning to what objects previously treated as exterior and nonhuman and neglected as subjects might have to say when they resume the subject position. Myth and fable are, in this way, a means of re-embodying the lyric form with which I am experimenting. As

Dorothy Nielsen points out, the lyric, "with its roots in ancient drama and medieval troubadour song, was once marked by its literal connection to voice and therefore to body.

Consequently, lyric at one time emphasized the biological aspect of human life. However, since the invention of printing and the growth of silent reading, 'voice' and 'song' have become increasingly metaphorical when applied to the genre" (129).

Language in heat hopes to return the lyric to its biologic roots—not just to articulate ecological concerns but to enact ecological processes in the use of grammar and syntax. (I discuss one way language in heat performs ecology on page 59-60 in my discussion of the poem "but to submit to articulation is the beginning of—.") By manipulating standards of

"correct" expression, language in heat is poised between traditional meaning making and what Cole Swensen calls an "emotional charged beyond-sense" {Hybrid xviv) and, as such, requires a nimble attention and mental suspension.

Jed Rasula's This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry and Lauterbach's essay "Use This Word in a Sentence: Experimental" inspire me to label my linguistic experiments as, according to Lauterbach's classification system, "hot." In her exploration of the shared etymological roots of "experience" and "experiment," Lauterbach writes: "I think perhaps science undertakes cool experiments and art undertakes hot experiments. By 'hot' I 55 mean the kinds of formal discoveries that serve affective or spiritual needs; when the affective space is averted, the result is often experimentation for its own sake, self-conscious and self-referential, the aesthetic equivalent of narcissism" {Night Sky 9-10). By "heat," I likewise mean language that hopes to serve affective or spiritual needs and that tests the limits of expressivity not for its own self-conscious and self-referential needs and not to demonstrate the superior intellect of the craftsman who has made language to perform such feats. Language in heat, rather, experiments with non-standard grammatical practices so as to deconstruct the binary assumptions on which the narcissistic human ego is based. Language in heat is, in this sense, biodegradable: "a thought for composing beings, for being decomposed and recomposed, for being composed (with equilibrium, staying cool), for being compost (heating up)" (Rasula 27). The transcendent lyric subject becomes the compost out of which a web of interconnected voices is composed. As Swensen writes,

"[pjerhaps the most basic project of sentient beings is to grow the world" ("Artist's" 232).

Perhaps, by experimenting with "hot" language, we can think beyond the binary world of doers and doing and re-imagine our sentience in "genuinely social and actively relational terms" (Haraway 3). Instead of diverting ourselves with band-aid or cosmetic solutions like litterbug campaigns and greenbelts, we can take a new perspective on the processes that link organism and place. It is, indeed, possible that language be one of the processes by which we explore our shared metabolism with the world.

My primary linguistic interest—not only in this section, but in the manuscript as a whole—is in punctuation. Brenda Hillman argues that punctuation

was developed to bring out meaning in the oral delivery of [written] words.

When the idea of punctuation began, marks were inserted by readers or 56

scribes, not, for the most part, by writers... so silent reading and the art of

punctuation arrive in the same few centuries, bringing a different relation

between interpretation and experience itself. ("Cadenced" 174)

I agree: punctuation creates hierarchies within sentences, privileges some clauses while

subordinating others, closes some words and opens others, makes syntax happen and creates

rhythm and emphasis, and regulates silence and forms "pre-meaning events" (175).

According to standard grammatical rules, the comma, for example, separates introductory,

non-restrictive, or non-essential information from the "main" idea. Parentheses separate

supplementary information even more completely, effectively sandwiching certain clauses off

from the train of thought. Semi-colons, in contrast, separate clauses of equal weight that are

closely related. A period signals the end of an idea. And so forth.

Punctuation guides readers through what would otherwise be a labyrinth of words.

Our commitment to rendering punctuation precisely through standardized rules is a way of

limiting words' possibilities, of signalling to readers which meaning to choose. In "stories not

about love," I play with these rules and experiment, specifically, with the open-ended

parenthesis, the virgule, the ellipsis, and the em dash period so as to reflect critically on the

slippage between intent and affect (what the writer intends to say and what the reader ends

up hearing), on the relations between interpretation and experience, and on the differing

impact of silence in silent and oral readings. For example, I discussed above in my

consideration of bingham's poems how she and I employ the virgule and parenthesis (pages

14-15). The open-ended parentheses that open the title of each prose poem in "stories not about love" are intended to thwart linearity and chronology and suggest that the narrative works via association, or leaps. Something happens on the other side of the parenthesis but 57

those events are not narrated. Consider the open-ended parenthesis in the title ") adam was

(not an old man," which aims to be more than a matter of silence or setting certain

information aside as supplementary (Carr, to loot 210). The punctuation is also intended to

create tone of voice and to suggest a change in inflection when the words are read out loud:

the parenthesis is meant to insert an element of hesitancy and uncertainty and to suggest a

degree of privacy and intimacy in the words to follow, as if the speaker isn't sure of what he

or she wants to say, whether the telling is appropriate, and if, as an alternative to the

"official" story, it will be dismissed by unready ears.

The parentheses as I use them are meant to indicate where the gaps happen in the

casual chain of events but don't explain what those events are. Because the parentheses

never close, there is no "accurate" indication of when the flashback, flash forward, or aside

ends and the "main" narrative resumes. The open-ended parentheses thus can imply

simultaneity: events happen in the same moment. Or, at least, it's impossible to settle on a single

chronology—first this, then that. The narrative is open to interpretative ambiguities that are,

as Lauterbach has argued, "realistic:" "an acknowledgement of interpretative ambiguities" is

"the only possible / negotiation with reality / and the ways in which language pictures or

captures it" {Night Sky 42).

With the open-ended parentheses and the subtitles that open each section of the six prose poems that compose "stories not about love," I intend not to picture or capture reality.

I want to question whether there is ever "a distilled or stabili2ed 'reality'" (Lauterbach, Night

Sky 42) that can be told beginning to end, front to back. The illusion is necessary for conventional notions of selfhood, which depend on cause and effect, before and after, action and reaction and consequence as a way of ordering the world into digestible binary 58 categories. But I want to posit an alternative to the "dialectical world of subject and object, where everyone and everything is independent, disconnected" (Gander 137). The dismantling of narrative assumptions seems to me an apt place to do so. Because so much is left unsaid and because each individual section of "stories not about love," does not, in a strict sense, "begin" or "end," the plot becomes one of fortune, of chance. Narrative is, like the kind of subjectivity I want to perform, collaborative and relational, a matter of choice.

How do you fill in the gaps, the plot asks? What do you make of all this open-ended-ness?

Where do you sketch possible beginnings and endings? If meaning is not progressive, then how do you make sense of the story? I hope that, by asking these questions, readers will take more responsibility for their perceptual habits, for how they create meaning from the reality the printed text seems to be.

The internal slashes aim to further question linearity and chronology by artificially breaking the flow of the sentence. As I discuss in my exploration of brigham's poetics, the virgule as I intend it creates a double meaning or a turn, encouraging, as Hillman argues, "the words on the other side of the slash to be wanderers, unsettled, abject" (184). To Hillman, the internal slash illustrates the unresolvable, inarticulable heart of experience, the dilemma of not knowing and therefore being unable to make a choice. Hillman offers an excerpt from

Lauterbach's long poem "N/est" as an example:

I walked up and down in the kitchen with her crying in my arms she was five months old/1 said she is angry not to speak

does not speak to me thinks I do not like kids because I like to revision the silence/or because

on the street she is 59

wearing a black wig short skirt bright red lipstick high heels walking with her father she says the wig is hot/in the photos she is barely recognizable as herself they have made her up[...] {Stair 76)

Hillman argues that the slash

severs the line, giving it an independence from its destiny, even though what

follows each slash seems inevitable, not presenting a choice at all [...] These

slashes pressure the narrative [...] [by] callfing] attention to the helplessness

of having to participate in one's own plot. Rather than giving an

"either/or/both" situation, the slashes "artificially" break the free verse line

that was about to be broken anyway. Double breaking, like a move in sports.

[...] Such punctuation has nothing to do with resting but with the sorrow of

choice. Why not start a new line? The slash in the middle of everything, is

why; the non-existence, is why. (184)

Similarly, I employ the internal slash as a way of dispersing meaning, of moving

enjambment inward, from the end of the line to the middle, and of inserting an element of

choice and of chance into the free verse line. In ") but to submit to articulation is the

beginning of—.," for example, the participle "knowing" is literally "forlorn crosshatched boomerang"; the sense of the participle "knowing" works several ways:

forlorn crosshatched boomerang knowing/ knowing/ knowing the corn leans right, limbs left, each foot marries forward, fall—. (Carr, to loot 261)

Combined with the virgule and the line break, the repetition of "knowing" aims to unmoor language from our syntactical assumptions: is "knowing," for example, functioning as a 60 describing word, as a thing, or as an action word? Is it, in other words, a quality of being, a state of being, or a happening? If "knowing" acts as a verb, then it is divorced from the associative cluster of nouns we expect. Who or what is knowing and whom or what is known? The corn might be known or it might itself be performing the act of knowing.

Sentience, like sense, is unmoored, loosed to wander among a number of possible identifications.

In "stories not about love," I use the ellipses and em dash period similarly: to re­ direct attention to what's left out, to the residual meaning behind what is recorded in the written word. As alternatives to the period, the ellipsis and em dash period also question the assumption of closure. While the ellipses lingers, indecisive, the em dash period severs the sense of the sentence, breaking the sentence before it ends. The em dash period is, to borrow from Hillman "a profound, tiny silencer. It wounds the page" (181). This punctuation is a rude interruption; it suggests that a digression might follow and catapults the narrative into white space. To me, the em dash period forecloses the possibility of response, sends words echoing indecisively because the thought wasn't finished, postpones the satisfaction of "knowing" the whole story, and shatters confidence in the possibility of wholeness.

For example, in "at first, you were nothing not ever lonely—.," the first line of ") in the ten percent of our human—.,"the em dash period marks the passage of time (Carr to loot

239). In "(what we ate—. who we ate—. & how we prevailed—." I mean the em dash periods to convey tone of voice: overwhelmed with guilt and grief, unable to articulate her sins aloud, America stutters and splutters (239). The em dash period in "she is urgent, being ourselves—." is a matter of consumption (246): the white space literally consumes the 61 referent, leaving the source of her urgency as well as who it is "ourselves" refers to unexplained. The em dash period in "terrible, glorious, singing—." acts like a fermata, extending the sound of the terrible, glorious singing past the printed text and into the available white space. The final em dash period of the collection, which acts in lieu of a conclusion or resolution, also aims to extend the wordless and yet sensical laughter beyond the space of the printed word: "where does it come from this/ desire, in the / throat of language, the glorious unstrung light of June, while / the jaguar of sweet laughter—." (267).

Such punctuation is all about choice. It is against correctness and for freedom: there is no correct reading, no correct self, no correct way of life. Rather, the final em dash period of "stories not about love" insists on the reader's freedom, ability, and responsibility to choose, "without etiquette or / influence" (Carr, to loot 267). Howe writes that "[i]t is only in the act of working on something, be it manual or mental labor, that you are aware of being at least half at the mercy of a will that is not personal, is not your own" (Winter 164). "Only" perhaps takes her argument one step too far; I would, however, agree that the mental labor I devote to punctuation puts me at mercy. I intend, in turn, that the "experimental" uses of punctuation throughout to loot to hew & Eden put readers at the mercy of choice. Though choice is difficult, choice is sometimes a chore and can often be sorrowful, mere is also happily at the heart of choice. Choice is a way of embracing intention as well as the cultural baggage any reader brings to any reading. The process of choosing how to read the em dash period aims to ask readers to re-attend to the words themselves, to rethink the relationships between denotation and punctuation, to consider sense in context, to think about "what is hidden behind each word, what intention, what fact [...] to strip away fraud [...]" (Howe, 62

Winter 150). Choice—like this poem -is both a beginning and an ending. It suggests a margin of uncertainty and serves as a reminder of the not always but sometimes pleasurable labor of placing oneself in time, in place, in relation to others, in the text, before or after the em dash period...

In the final poem, ")or to begin again," the fractured pronouns of the preceding sections—you, he, she, they, I—have finally resolved into "we," who appear only as "our bodies." It is dusk; god—or something godlike—beckons from the trees. "We" have not necessarily achieved happiness but we are making a choice. The instinctual flight of the child and the chicken in "13 ways of happily" has transformed into deliberate intention. "We" are taking one step further, towards resolving the disequilibrium between self and world, subjectivity and reality. Today, as I am writing this defense of to loot to hew <&'Eden, I think of the book my husband is writing a room away, on our desktop: Tell It To The Trees. Tell It To

The Trees is a linked short story collection that considers the ripple effect of a teenage suicide through a small Missouri town during "the flood of'93," as those of us who lived through it know it. I lived in Illinois then; I was an unhappy, awkward pre-teen, with very little sense of self; I have a photograph of myself, angry and sunburnt, sandbagging so the river will overflow on the other side of the levy, into Missouri. ") or to begin again" is a beginning because I am thinking about that moment for the first time in nearly a decade. For the first time in a decade, my thoughts are, seemingly of their own accord and without my consent, turning back home, probing deeper into the wound of faith, ambition, and childhood.

As I review "stories not about love," I see that this is an accurate reading. It's my particular reading, of course—I don't expect that all readers of to loot to hew <& Eden will feel this way. However, knowing myself, I can see that all along, the landscapes of "stories not 63 about love" have been evolving into Midwestern America. The images of corn, cows, churches, grasshoppers, crawdads, coyotes, crickets, cicadas, dogwoods, fireflies, high prairie skies—all of these gesture towards home. A home that is, quite appropriately, both imagined and real, equal parts fiction and fact. The tide of this final story—"state of grace"—refers both to home as I remember it and as it is, even at this moment, being re-written by my husband. Home is, in this sense, ecological; it is "not a matter of owning the land, or of working the land, but of learning to hold the land in mind, to begin gropingly—blind on a dark hillside—to imagine ourselves as part of it" (Daniels, Trai/73).

6: Happily: The Experiment Continues

Happily isn't the end of the experiment; it isn't observable results and verifiable conclusions. Happily is the experiment sustaining itself, evolving into further experiments.

Happily is an absorbing errand one pursues not with the hope of completion but rather for the joy of the task, the pleasure culled from the very act of doing. "I mean, of course, as

Robert Duncan says, "that happiness is itself a forest in which we are bewildered, run wild or dwell like Robin Hood, oudawed and at home" (qtd. in Hejinian Language 385).

Happily provides the synergy needed to move forward, to push past the limits of our abilities, to pursue bewilderment hopefully, to run wild in our suffering. Happily is not a state but rather a momentum, a method of searching. Happily is thus both a symbol of freedom, of not being weighed down, and a symbol of itinerancy, of self-elected homelessness. It does not abandon self and civilization but rather collaborates with both in 64 the hope of cultivating a more sustainable sense of self-worth. The knowledge happily produces is thus expectant, anticipatory, forward-thinking, always already in preparation for the next great experiment.

In to loot to hew <& Eden I wanted to sketch possible connections amongst poetics, lyric subjectivity, feminist theory, and ecological sensibility. I wanted to push up against the limitations of human perception and articulation. I wanted to understand how words might somehow be more accountable to the world. My goal was to call on the imagination in a truly re-creational capacity, as an active force that reorganizes the ecologies of myth and reality, perception and expression. I wanted to re-animate the world as a speaking subject and to revise the relationship between woman and nature.

George Sand once wrote to Gustave Flaubert: "I assure you that there is only one pleasure: learning what one does not know, & one happiness: loving the exceptions" (Sand and Flaubert 89). In the ongoing experiment that is happily, I am learning an epistemological openness to the exceptions. I take pleasure in the choice not to know, to set myself free in the forest that is narrative. As the experiment goes on, I will continue the process of re­ organizing human perception and articulation, of growing worlds in which sentient beings reconnect with the significance of the ecologies that harbour them, and of using the imagination's transformative powers to articulate the ways in which nature authors culture and not vice versa. This also, for me, is happily. 65

THE STORY WILL FIX YOU IT IS THERE OUTSIDE YOUR & 66

]all that other life as green blur[ casting its shadow over birdsong & sunbreaking,

an elderly couple compare scars a rainbow unspools from a white crucifix

god wanders through the waiting room, picks up a crushed dixie cup, a stethoscope, a shoe how long she says/ did it last, that paradise

—those green barbaric years— waterproof, shatterproof: proof i'm not sorry she says do you believe/ me

sirens wail & a frog sings back her name slops across the dotted line like a child's

or a lunatic's (as if in/ to a wound) it's an illusion she says you were ever alive/ lived 67

] girlhood replayed rewound a photogene simmering [ was she ever in love mature, healthy a citizen & how camouflaged in all that vivid/ vivid alive crushed lipstick lucky cigarette— ashing in the hollowed out womb of a china cow yours was the mouth of wish—

not static but frayed, unfettered furling, bamed in stereophonic & pastoral

back where memory is myth seeming in this strange autopsy surplus/ value

painfully small endings shreds of emptying one more element in the truth's immense disorder ]politics don't disappear they are going on inside[ & as for last night, which was yesterday only for part of it, syntax spills from car radios

a helicopter says wahtwhatwaht she stands there letting the words fall over her, splash—

& whether the child (but which one?) responds to love or her own name or is even herself upon awakening—

& if each leaf flourishing under complete neglect taking shape through contingency, halfway up & unfurling—

& as for being named so as not to have—in oblivion, in excess— to begin again— 69

Jin the refined lawn of the lord's handkerchief[ sunlight unclenches the fists of the happy honeysuckle

next to a wheelbarrow or beside some white chickens

common denominator, ubiquitous, capable of endless advertisement adam names, eve eats at the edge of the water but not in it yet, not close enough to see her own reflection he seizes the spade & she plays the hose each leaf halfforked holds light & then spills some 70

]who is the hero & was there a mother involved [ the child infuses everything, the child is here now.

this raw hope weeping with gratitude for the frog— in the feathery & bemused urban light frankly generous making simple demands hungry restless happy talking now in her high clear voice to a plastic soldier who kneels in the beautiful young grasses, which faith & story cohabit—here at the wingpoint of the universe 71

Jfrom a wrong turn to the shock of understandingf once we didn't exist & then through no fault of our own huddling beneath the taffeta underbelly of theJune sky

fading from hesitant to harsh we had to in the distance a church spire lances the sunset turning blank pages there are small blue ponds evaporating he slicks a stray piece of hair behind her ear my wife he says my wife my wife my— 72

] living safely in the bright falseness [ propelled into the future to which our backs are— finally—turned chickenshit or not enough words shuffle helter-skelter, inarticulate

a broken wing crocuses thrust through decomposing styrofoam

happy fistfuls of brightness all self-awareness & ego dissolving into memory 73

Jopen the door get out, climb over the guardrail, walk onto the bridge where the wind tears a handkerchief to shreds [

& the reverse: walk away stop wave

like a leaf before rain, the list unfurls: I— a wounded ecstasy & wholehog american—

could not, after all, let go of beauty bruised elbows & sunrouged gestalt

everything [blue] everything [empty] the body that implacable fact animal soup of the actual my husband, I say stupidly, with no notion— 74

Jgoodwife of sunset & muse of unmade beds[ marinating buffed white meat scouring shit from porcelain your beautiful cut hair licks

the burnt linoleum a bare bulb slung from fishing wire

night tumbles over telephone poles fresh-shaven calves a hyper/ bolic diamond

all edges spluttering fizzing at odds with your hand that trembles like the sea running out over stones

a cellphone chirps shredding the optimistic last flick of lit / ash from your cigarette

step barefoot & step lighdy into the fact: the expensive delicate ship sails on

the rose shorn from its stem does not know a tragedy has occurred

the leaves die but still the tree is there, /breathing 75

Jlike the story leaving achilles alive abruptly in that way[ she begins to undress all her clothes seem shiny-souled the change was automatic I she said I

to prove she is not me not that you may not be anyone anymore alone herself along unspoilt unburdened buoyant even

like drawing a chalk door in concrete & falling through the poem bleeds blue across her wrist the sun flings blood across the windowpane rippling

as she turns come unstuck from the swim the horror that is tomorrow ] still life in a little black dress & sprayon tan[ through a thickedged kitchen tumbler the air conditioner obliterates the blue & empty view, sunlight litters marble fauns & steaks lowing beneath the palm trees pronouns cast their shadows graceless determined/ lonely & en route in the delusion of her body persephone wanders, ceaselessly—like styrofoam or chlorophyll— decomposing elbows & knees suspended awkwardly over the present yes you're right it hurts to live like this sliced meat having setded having happily beside having happily held a spoon 77

Jmind out through the eyes[ in soft pastels & sparkling parquet a beauty queen bleaches her teeth—

slipping like the shadows of leaves between Venetian blinds—

scavenging the toxic waste of the well-informed —men in shirtsleeves butchering bonestrewn zoysia

dandelions prostrate & dehydrating their fragrant sacrifice disoriented in the open air the sea bulldozes the shore— o appoggiatura sparrow what is this self I think I will lose—

—naked on the bed no right no wrong no right just the heart dissolving into meat this matrix of cells spreading out gathering a mind, a soul

solidifying from the blank fog of the body unknowing & slowly reeling into die neverending 21st century daylite— 78

] reality or, a moment poised before the in/everable—[ in the dark, in the middle of america in die middle of this slick, sleek objective, indulgent century

the world irradiates outward from dilapidated deciduous bones, a tiny lawn with cement squares for adirondack easybacs

the flap of a wayward newspaper lifting its broken wing, in the endless dream of embryos split open sliced shrinkwrapped my mother [pretty, contained & accessible] sweeps fashionably down the botded water & canned fruit aisle— 79

Jback the same way go a new way spill[ tail lites throw the shadows of the trees across familiar shapes in the bedsheets where they are broken

the gigantic lovely mouth of a famous movie star moans in the birdstrewn wind, & eurydice dies

for die second time breathless & aroused her body humming the story will fix you in the sunseared air she thinks it is there, outside your <&° 80

13 WAYS OF HAPPILY 81

Book 1: the journal of elastic perception.

Getting married is like that. Getting married is not like that. —Marie Ponsot "The Border" 82 draft 1, eye, white & spring. 1 the young housewife forging myth in the kitchen—like all the old hopes, the beginning can only be called by what it is not 83

2 something panting—truly—in this ecstatic anarchic release into the commonplace: the very thing (as foetus) & object of enjoyment (amore propre) disoriented in die whitehot air

3

—yes everyday falling while gravity throws apples from the trees— 84

4 in which version did we— a woman (double you'd a child (so microscopically correct a man (practices yes, no— share diat single cell? 85

5 in the leaf & bud & how the blue swings swagger from cowboy hats sparrows make happy dustbaths—

6 try to be patient, high above the old white

pinwheels in the dilated gaze of the sublet the sparrow's eye, leafless— with bewildered adjacency 86

7 as it falls—unchristened unclarified every hour accidental a child & a chicken play tag in flight from the everchanging it—. 87

8 —decaying now in finemilk foam of sea the dream traces a hand-picked wingbone unfading wax flowers 88

9 it's from this wound you first emerged oblivious in excess fish in the air begging for sea soul in the gap between 89

10 yes there is no one to tell you for years you will fall, in a gradual reenactment—.

11 listen, like wings sprouting in the mind the bonepile grows 90

12 but these are very real, very precise butterflies all-mond brown & a-mind white an ecstasy of crystalline palimpsest wobbling across wheatfields swayed— like skyscrapers or trees— 91

13 from time to time do we all go through this dissolve root to leaf of now intimate at last, on the tremolo near wingtip

after]. Retallack 92 draft 2, & you know this is your fate to waver.

1 on a rainspun afternoon when bombs fall a continent away the season flimmers like a watery jewel on the dream's cobweb & the sparrow of what you are wakes, this slaphappy derelict— 93

2 in the empty ballfield the rockies' chalk outline dissolves choked with chickweed & wildradish die fatslush rain is trying to explain—. 94

3 forget about Venetian blinds, slip through that window—spilling like thick blonde milk a solo joy note

4 crumpled spandex sun carmurder noise dioxidedrunk magnolia & soon too sparrow chorus 95

5 Christ whatever this strange hopeful fever— in the mountains violets have broken the rocks inaccurate grasses keep a feckless guard— 96

6 self conscious with beauty & food, a sobbing frog leapt from that generous pond 97

7 in the dazzling subdivisions where no tree grows a she in loslung pants & spaghetti strap zigzag catwalks utterly lost in the morning hope of meat

8 (you do not know which to prefer: the shadows of lifesized fiberglass cows or the child with a plush octopus, barking 98

9 aimless wasteful & drunk the sun is lunatic logic but lovely yes like lemonjuice splashed

10 but world is one short, an off number & you in your generous bed are the last astonishing mammal in whirligig slomotion solidifying from the dream

you are coming back through— 99

11 wheeling out of your ordinary thighs through curtains & cloud yeast the fine young season flails screes skirls a mirage of buoyant polyglot—.

12 nearby by accident, green mountains melt like jello in slo liberation the world turns on its stem 100

13 (you too are wavering you are careless volunteering your seed—

after J. Kyger draft 3, the flower of having passed through paradise in a dream.

1 something [dueling in a drop of water below a layer of scum] reaches us from the deepest realities: the marine world... 102

2 take out your pen./ begin./ with the terrible gaze of songbirds two elderly drunks stare at the girl in die pepsi ad wasps fly noiseless through chandeliers the arc admits its powerlessness, / & God. 103

3 today, as yesterday, a stallion rolls in a pasture of blue ether & we are his/tory's human hands 104

4 ... each moment of grief & surprise overwhelmed by an immense swarm of invisible—

5 phyto plankton in a raindrop echo & expire swim ming in sky 105

6 sparrows gossip an angel irradiates out from a lobster coloured curb saying America begins here p.s. so lonely blooming 106

7 in spring riots of sparrow the child boobytraps a bulldozer taffeta cannas/ toss fistfuls of rain on the beautiful grasses, where they are broken

exuberant, wet a newspaper lifts its broken wing shadows drip from treeflesh mitochondria evaporate, shredding sun 107

9 space voyages report nothing, nothing, nothing— 108

10 soaring over a neon water fall a tin & broken blemish on the sky's backwash the end a billboard proclaims of the rainbow 109 11 ... the dandelion bites its tongue on the green hardness grow ing inside against the hum of luminous doves you strain forward, hoping... 12 brilliant, scalped dreaming the hero's sleep—a god who made, it said, the world

13 which way would you have come this way, delirious & shredded sailing sideways through the greenly ravished vowels

after F. Ponge Ill

Book 2, an alphabet of gluing from misshapen wings. The curious, sings. —Erin Moure draft 4, the long fall to dirt heaven.

1 the colonel of a paradisetree whips in wind like a train

over violets, waving to whatever down there he thinks is a god

2 in the heaven of June, a naked angel scratches a mosquito bite checks her watch at wits end the limp guillotined gladioli are radiant & lonely singing in disbelief— 113

3 the sun is molten lookingglass masquerading in the foil of every kind of tree 114

4 you are of three minds: like elegant grasshoppers tearing each other to pieces in the unleavened dandelions dreaming of someone not born yet someone who will change your life— 115

5 in marvellous bones of bermudagrass & whiteclover, where a soft blue bullet decomposes our god the father on a rainbow gallops horseless

6 the skypelt makes its last great sentence—.

cosmos buds throw a pantomime of pink over the tiny graves the rain opens in his tracks 116

7 ants carry bread in their mouths across the immense & fertile grasses, the light is gorgeous & they are so quick— 117

8 think now of all the splendour of the ethereal: angels & cricketfrogs making beautiful clatter, children bright as pickup sticks in their wet clothes screaming through dead constellations 118

9 someone has invented happily solemnly hunting or flapping like busy flamingos in the flatlands of beauty

10 god's a contraction in the plot, like salt grains drying on the neck's edge of sea— 11 on the stained glass sheep accumulate in a few cramped words vineyards vanish into lime the garden takes residence in veiled women addicted to prayer—

12 so that we may pretend what is ephemeral is permanent— the child's orbit collapses, christ's exhaustion glisters among enormous applauding roses... 120

13 when the breath of the living shaves the season's bloodred comb the sun is strapped to witness...

after M. Ruefle 121 draft 5, half a wishbone expressing with broken breast the truth.

1 bouncing whitely off metal & chrome the child scrambles through hope's detritus a beautiful geometry of adverb & bone

2 already you hear what the blood is saying to the heart: neither ape nor angel 3 across stationwagons & training wheels the mute skeletons of wooden pirates plastic fish deboned deep fried chickens a chanel billboard is softclicking—

4 (with her gluedon oncorhynchus scales silt eyes & ears & larger- than-life the mermaid interlaces ambition & ephemeral—. 123

5 in its spilled blaze indignant & singular, a rainbow flails with its peculiar vibrato pi unfurls...

6 quaking almond children demand large hamburgers, the shadows go on pulling one thing toward another 124

7 it is the 4th of July, you are smoking silvathins heat paddles across the brown drink in a happy glass, already you wanted to leave, already you are letting go... 125

8 you see how easy it is... the lonely hero flings herself to watery delirium bobs out broken up & up, this ruptured insane voluptuous ness— 126

9 overspilling the water's charred silk: woosey sun, white nunca, red meat, this bright hydrogen as/if flimmering

10 like certain limits in calculus never arriving at any promised heaven gravity erases the seams 127

11 the pool goes on, islands of chryselephantine sky —this is happening it has in fact/ (without you —everything does—

12 from which singing must come—. love is blank, broken, a sail at the end of the world... 128

13 (a glossalia of sloppy blonde your ruined hope flowers

after R. Johnson 129 draft 6, dandelion to the instant.

1 we come into the world & there it is makeshift, first/person time & wish enmeshed a severed hand absorbing the (fruit) trees 130

2 words curve backwards like bluelight filtering through a keyhole.. .or like a shoal of junebugs serrating inverted worlds of hotviolet & rippling enamelgreen 131

3 among great sopping fists & slanty wobbling wings of tree, noon is atoms alive, joyous & improbable

4 next to diet dinners & silverqueen a butchered calf sings—. 132

5 the murdered world infuses everything, the murdered world is here now. (the only question is what, before the god became a god who, it said, called— 6 wet & senselessly beautiful.- treebone palimpsests the concrete.— trashblown. but the sky is triumphant, pinwheeling.—

7 o louvre of the world, inhabited once by apes, snowy egrets disintegrating, a sundrunk bulldozer, gods rippling in the hotcoloured air... 134

8 the minnow—exhausted, singing on the surface of its human —surrenders

9 turned inside out beyond their own nerves, your bones are hollering... 10 this is tomorrow. scissors & silverware, a camouflage pencil. the fruit trees & fragments are politely unravelled but no meal has been prepared—

11

your family eats quickly from trays silent insane insects shred the Venetian

blinds the child bruises, & steps out of the room

forever undressing & undreaming, sometimes walking in that crowd you become it... 136

12 the treemind pushes out of the window frame like a flame, the storm clouds are speeding, extravagant, unnecessary...

(missing a hand & one part of a wing

13 which one are you/ & who would know—.

after], Williams 137

Book 3, secret histories of the vector.

Memory is a strange Bell— Jubilee, and knell —Emily Dickinson 138 draft 7, scorned as timber, beloved of the sky.

1 you emerge from the photobooth with yourself in triplicate ferrying corn on the hoof now pigs in a barrel the Swanson man lifts a finger, honks 2 (then it was fall: or no, it was summer ending, there are statues & fountains, ruthlessly carved, plastic bags in palm trees (now again, trees

3 freshly bulldozed childsafe you are leaving the details of your body behind: the (il)logic of wings, mind swaggering in strips of meat, sunwhite diamond shedding sun 140

4 stilletoed spaghettistrapped bare backed girlhood is a dying economy & the birthday is a makeshift— 141

5 what world is made, that made us that we keep on making (i'm not sorry he says do you/ believe me

6 the trees in their un believable foliage are scissoring & razor ing the crushed aspirin sky, syntax spills from car radios you stand there letting the words fall over you, splash 7 you don't look old well I don't look/ my age/ well you don't want to look 18 again do I

8 sparkling like snakes, like barbed wire, like sunlight, you are thirty-one—summer-muscled & blooming blackly in the gunpowder oijes 9 god hovers over antique rifles & white wicker, spoonbread pickled tomatoes artillery punch crawdad coloured crumbs & fleshless bones, the young housewife reassembling youth in her mind—

10 looking at/ like/ what shall 1/ say how is the truth to be/ said believe me/ I 144

11 happily comes into the world & there it is a moment of accelerated hellbent flush with the curb

12 step over & step lighdy into the fact: a man unfolding a woman into an ambulance, a rainbow unspooling from a crucifix, sirens splash & a frog sings back... 145

13 (where is your mother not that she/ or any other could have—

forE. Wunker 146 draft 8, her insides in a special receptacle.

1 fishbelly white the world swims in igneous haloes & brilliant senseless cement, enormous clouds, like violet brains—. 147 2 here where women are dying & birthing, humming with dreams & grease the isotopes touch & touch & in their small distances cries of angels descend... 148

3 separate, enraged—your beautiful chemicals part the megawatt light like water 4 now you're alone, the past is burning, glorious, in the bruised roses of sunset, pale birds fumble like roots

5 the wrecked past unfolds, flopping like a dirty hanky around jeweltoned jello, styrofoam telephone, the devil here, as elsewhere is in the details... 150 6 not yet recognizing this as the story of our life...

7 you know what I mean. scattering away, in all directions away from yourself, in rodomontading microwave & god's/ benevolent, sense less gaze 151

8 (we were so in love we didn't know what it was... 9 white geraniums rake the butchered landscape, heredity forms in a raindrop.

cutting straight through the middle of the world a single ferreting drunk, sings.

10 the IV scrapes the linings of your veins seconds swim by, silken salty

translucent birds fly from the open wound, (as if god had turned to water & fruit die memory 153

11 listen, there are crickets singing in the stars, the sky doesn't have any air in it, the world is made of paper— 154 12 god hovers over the

o-shaped cementblock that is St. Agnes, a frivolous cut of pig, your arms with their desire for rain & razor blades... 13 (& wasnt it eve who said hello. & wasnt it gravity who fathered density & friction. & what about nuclear power volcanoes & Milton's blindness. & what about live obsolete fish stalking impossible depdis, stretching their fins beginning to bleed 156 draft 9, in the meat of my functioning heart

1 —two slender sinewy humans, a fleshly laughing tree white space spilling like milk 157

2 the garden is a surly animal, crouching: opaque with the word & unalarmed by birdsong

3 I mean: no one ever died there. I mean: the dream melts like taffy as it enters the world. 158

4 (floating without a hope, floating in hope one by one we left going our separate ways impersonal & cellular like the silvery fish undisturbed by surface 159

5 with the switch of a neurotransmitter from instinct to gill slits to embryo through personality, to the biogrammar of genes whose mirage & delicate polyglot— 160 6 (you had to, you ricocheted 161

7 think now of wild cold stars fighting great battles over territory & love... out & groundless the girl jockeys clear, a miss-pelt joyousness

8 ... snow slips from god's back 162

9 sometimes the angel flies in pairs, sometimes the angel is a restless filigree over wetsilk snow. 163

10 the bruised glass jimmies. small animals vanish at the road's edge every where sailing sideways through mute velvet stars, the hospital's isolated humming brains. 11 like crazy gods crumpled leaves still breathing on the pavement a soprano peels from a rapsong her solonote frantic frivolous exact

12 the sirens are bright, scalding & the dead/ are coming back— wonderful still for having/ nothing to do with yourself or his—. 165

13 the station's logo opens & closes like an eye in the spilled watery light where prayer had been you lay naked thinking Lord, part me from him I cannot bear to ever—

after P. Levin 166

Book 4, the art of the elegant integral.

... the mystery is that there is something for us to stand on.

—George Oppen 167

draft 10, caption for a miniature.

1 as if that negligee flapping on a clothesline could—

2 (the owned yard was soft at night the window drowning in stars & of course you believed 168 3 a shadow whorled in the scallop of the movie star's silk babydoll it was a small act of patriotism)

4 a woman & a sparrow are like that: breathing 169

5 you do not know which to remember a carnation wobbling in a jelly jar the negligee pooling at your feet or just before

6 between the eye of the sun & the eye of the snapshot the mannequin so long in the habit of repeating a fragment of tense unsutured— 170

7 do you not see the wind carelessly throwing the maple's charred limbs across the bedsheets? 171

8 you can't be sure of the logic of biology, the certain romance of ink & the beginning— though you know too that the negligee is involved in what you are 172

9 dazzled at the edge of dissolve a bouquet of bruised roses skims the linoleum—

10 your face is like that too—coming & going shrunk to a silk & lace pinup 173

It (you mistook dinner for everlasting glory the flash bulb shattered into shadow

12 but to be heroic the young housewife must be pulling off her long black gloves— 174

13 goddess was translated like water, a pure thing distilled from the brine after K Waldrop 175 draft 11, beserk coyote of the spring tense.

1 moonlight snags & eddies around one hundred twenty pounds of quixotic wrapped in cellophane

2 like a lady buckling her knight's heroic in technicolour as if the instant celebrity of the first person plural could save you— 176

3 bleeding black in the slush the bulldozer happily overlooks who knows what— 177

4 things that are [Gods dissolving like clouds & things as they will be [epic, with a chance—

5 do you not see the true american hysteric, disguised as a bride? 178

6 you know the romance of boycott & you know the soldier sprawl-legged on the front-page you know too that the zipper the dixie cup the tupperware is involved in what you know— 179

7 in a flash of lightning a jackrabbit silhouetted by stars three carnations thrusting through winter take the edge off chivalric 180

8 when the newspaper folds into sections as if each were of its own mind 181

9 when it is a marriage at all-

10 the celebrity & the spaghetti-O & the headlines 182

11 a pinwheel of chickweed scuttles across astroturf—

12 (once you mistook kleenex scattered like hysteric petals a military orchid blooming in a cheap zippo 183

13 all winter, the firs were heroic the sparrows were pecking at shrapnel in the pinecones a coyote was keening on the jagged edge of human

forB. Can draft 12, american destiny install'd amid the kitchenware.

1 in slomo coronal blo-off, clumps of cloud comb die trees' dilapidated ribs the city hurls its squatness against die sky

2 dandelion to the instant, a sparrow empties its cry into the blank memory of heaven the Lord, a billboard says, is my shepherd [I shall not want] 3 sunset bangs off windowpanes, flinging blood & taffeta across the crumbling sill the young housewife peels grapes for eyeballs

4 having completed the ordeal of expression an evergreen pirouettes, the television tinkles a melancholy ode to joy 186

5 you remember lingerie melting into verdure, monarchs dreaming in the milkweeds' fragile fractured closets... 187

6 & weren't you capable of another life then in mad hope a sentence decomposed all the sloppy disorder & bloody sprawl of your frank & unemployable heart—. 188

7 the young housewife warms the eggs of future birds so tender ly & so desperate... 189

8 (in the compressed airiness of television static the past shifts forward I am only my mother— 190

9 an angel mistaken for footprint left in the flesh of snow

10 she wipes everything down its contaminated a lifetime of scraped—Christ

in a pastel landscape, shade trees flushed with slaughterhouse 191

11 when, for example, you were eve born in wedlock but out of love—.

12 like the butterfly—or the old gods— who stalks nothing & lives on nectar— a fish gapes & swims beneath the untouched bones ofyour food 192

13 black grease atoms bloom on snowflakes' edge all dream misunderstanding & emptied of all/ deity—

for R Armantrout 193 postscript, the chapel of the sparrow's body.

Erasing miss-pelt joylessness it writes the text of the beautiful love we subscribe to when accurately read. —Marie Ponsot 194 draft 13, slope of the child's everlasting.

1 eating the heart out of the season an avalanche of white flower whispering also, perhaps maybe jes 195

2 smeared with a little green dis/ integrate morning strings the stippo with shiny moonbits a stump echoes trunk, blossom thigh, butchered bone wry as a flute 196

3 in the invisible world happily ever after, fragments of shepherd lead grains of sheep... 197 4 death begins like this: camouflaged in the fig leaves & fish scales 198

5 like chloro phyll spread daily across the generous lawns of the newly rich—the desire was always there snakelike sidewinding 199

6 green tongues pivot like windblown handkerchiefs the garden is growing into itself shredding all the silence until you hardly know what you are thinking— 200

7 watching a sparrow-at-the-end-of-the-world the black cat composes herself, or rather is decomposed.

8 (we were always in sight of god. at the moment of birth you carried all of the dead—. 201

9 & no one minds what these disoriented things become we know nothing of their deaths, except the stillness flower ing in the moment after 202

10

o these blind minute hands we are climbing while daffodils flaimily shed their skeins fistfuls of brightness upholster the tomb— 203

11 like a season which has no end except those we invent season of delicate grasses breaking their slender spines season of dandelions coming unstuffed season of sparrows & suicide 204 12 the white wound dances on the tree's tender black fingers, growing with each bright baptism accustomed to its own vulnerability—. 205

13 love, the season has opened, like a fist, immaculate as bone or chrysanthemums, burning in the sun. I am afraid of what the world will do...

after T. James 206

STORIES NOT ABOUT LOVE 207 drama of the forfeit ) a splitbrain grace note. imagine it: fleshlyness. leapfrog slingshot see (like eve throwing apples sideways from the trees. gravity curls fernstalk, a red wind licks your elbows, in current downriver singing the ocean grows, smoke bellies the flagpole. slimankled oaks dream in soil. he goes ahead coadess lightsoaked. breadiing in folds, like a fish, he deals all his selves (was it a rib or catgut like the corollas of a dying sun how/ brilliant 209

) adam was (not an old man an alligator makes bass note brackets: b flat. salt water leaps like fried diamonds, tiny windows open & close in the bird flap. the world is a breathless gown, god thundery, drunk. in the salt flats, fried chicken & juliet flowers, a vague beautiful boy fishing from shadows of translucent/ black prayer. a fever trills in the fruit trees. he flips a mooneyed mackerel, lord have mercy you feel it in your mouth between your thighs... 210

) unbutton my ribs pollen rapture, world. was insignificant before he bent his gorgeous, hairless attention, before gravity gave us fluids & flesh, before in bitter combat with its two natures, the angel fell to meet itself—. (mind in a porcelain arrow, heart in the eye of the saintly thighs of tall glossy trees. (sinews flowering from a brilliant bridge: if only, then—. 211

) the snake was a woman, she must have been: an astonished moon carves nouns of cloud. leaping in shy integral curves, black angels & small birds, gloomy begonias & white cucumbers, a ruined scarecrow. (struggling (in fact) & not/ with one's existence the grassblades touch & touch & in dieir small distances, the myth begins: as family life, as skin one lash by lash undreaming— ) the pour-usness of a passing ego—. jaguars slip through midnight hedges, waving, like a cadenza or a crocus, watery molecules of dew disperse, you are marble & salt, trailing rusty knifeblades of wing. a constellation scalped, salt of die unutterably—. crimson clouds looking like catde flower & expire. the pronoun softens/ like a stem, your heart makes a wooden sound, pumping—. ) the dream demands verbs—. sky hard/ as a gutted calf. a string quartet of daddy long legs, the clear untearful testament of gunmetal trees. dandelions like rows of saints: bewitched, meticulous. light slides up/ side down hogs of cloud curdle. a colt stampedes sunburnt grasses, fireflies marrow, climb death's shoulders. he has to take a break sit down have a smoke he has/ to think about it ) alchemy & the soil of original/ sin your voice cathedrals. between his edges & the trees, red. beautiful atoms exploding, & some solar systems. slender neurotic dinosaurs, the slang of sky. a chicken sparrow peers blindly, two petals fall, the sycamore offers its grief—. grasses tremble (here) (there) one self you say is not/ the way to live. seconds separate like yolk, make a shining envelope in lieu of flowers. at a certain point he will say now/ I am ready—. ) ellipsis, echo & psalm under olive trees, god eats sun. his voice slashes the fierce sky grabbing shadows. (dot & accent: grass.) (evaporation: meadow.) (& of rocks.) (or of water—.) infant flowers, sunbaked flies. finely tuned watermocassin ripple. the tree, that moved you. the tree, where you conceived. (& yet, in this deception, true happiness—. ) no shepherd either, & must be is/ moving on like a sentence or an angel, you looked back—. the galaxies of cow parsley, the canolacoloured corn... sour cloudbanks, tambourines of sun—. gravity puckers like an open wound. the orange trees are torched, intoxicated, howling, from where he stands, observing me as if 1/ were grass or dead, a stick figure on atom's edge, de/composing—. 217 show & tell ) on the first page of each new world's clouds like wildebeest across corn, french grasses wake in a sleepwarm script. like water: past cows two sizes bigger, proper nouns run riot... the extinct love of the unmoved lioness spills a pleiosaur frolics in a handmade pond, the world is a soft & perfect mannequin the future yawns through—. ) forever prey to the eyes life-sized, blue an alphabet twangs in cloud curdle, squashed angels splay minotaur wings, little petticoats of rain shred whatever surrounds, black tulips, bkdsong too silver for a seam, orange fish with blue tails like feathers. & through the vast interrogation of the frogs—. he is dreamy, in his last madness: hurled ) salt of the unutterably/ human in these early hours unadulterated it sounds like rain white with coloured hearts the fruit trees sway, the godchild ricochets like a bat or the black planets, drowning, tree bones thin & soften, cat eyes flash yellow diamonds back/ & back. she wants wanted have/ had wanted to be chosen &/ chosen again—. ) what she said, what he said, before/ the fact—. her feet make wing noises. a spotted turkey, a dove are lords in the corn. slivers of transparent fish swim: vague, beautiful, the frilled grasses pucker, he is naked, swaggery. (with a host/ in violence/ in need (you could understand both points of view but in reality, no. a snake mars the plain fact of bones,—& you are inside experience, like a parasite you/ sit like a god wanting/ him to die because you can't help yourself—. ) & he—. in his cruelly bright—. sunpetals fall from the uncut skydress like muses. the sycamore sows outward, un-winged. glowing with no edge between glacier, grass beats with wings beak feathers is spread on her like skin, vipering fanged a headless/ sentencing the swan coiled, made a coil— ) whosoever has let a minotaur enter them or a sonnet—. frogs shout, the world lies shattered. the blistered sky turns silver like spotted platelets drugged cows dot the distance dragonflies shrill on cirrus, (like spoons: lapsed or enjambed. in a universe animated by the gods, her miscellaneous brain unpleats, leaps. ) no system of the vernacular let cupids arm falter she prays o/ lord let it falter the words slant foxlike in & out of the trees dark margin—. like an ocean of surface becoming/ no surface, snake ripple, quickmashed coffeeblooms. in the green light her saltstripped hair, the young flesh of shoulders, where trout lilies used to be, the roots of fruit trees—. ) in last trapeze ecstasy they go toward the shadows/ like seals flung thin against the yellow jaguar glow, the black skin sifted up, seeped through the slither dance of flying fin flintstruck & falling like stars (a ball of fire hurled from what/ you thought was night hung/ in lightning mesh, soft organs open to life at the quick— ) what only the birdgene remembers a buffalo holds the sky between her thighs, saucers of mountain sway, among stars. deities spill, shining & suffering... not forgetting they can't ever,— their fury sings like eagles— skeletons unlean from fruit trees, falling like white gunsmoke. they want/ to be here, listen. the wind has blown all the birds from their hair, the world is like paper, stretched—. 227 scouts across america ) on the stalk of an instant, unpetal it is violent nuclear august & wings afloat: heavenly. a neon Pegasus flickers, a wedding corsage ricochets o Venetian, burnt icebergs lick the mountain's ankle, a moth drags its shadow across some solar systems, chickens sing the grief of the trees, from the inside out, gills to wings, wishbones to white meat thighs—. ) bearing the fiction of the white space that divides it, grasshoppers leap like rain, angels bloom in elastic tree shadow, expensive nouns slump. the beautiful skeletons of crawdads & cantaloupes swoon in secondhand—. I mean: being a mother made of her a loose species... who is not to have a body nor wings of steel, nor the ability—. a blue bullet decomposes, clouds burn with information. arachne donates her web. in the ten percent of her human she is hoping: & should a mythology intervene... 230

) in a world all broken out with Sunday,— a sparrow struts with a circus peanut like spring melt splosh the soft syllables hotdog & orangesoda spill from the vendor's lips we'll pay you a city bus says to read this ad a sparrow flanks the underbelly, clouds collapse like wildebeest, a young couple smoking Luckystrikes slap their beautiful ankles & elbows this always happens he says no she thinks it has never been so bad/ as this—. ) trying to be in love. ok. the world falls from its skin, angry butterflies poster their poison wings & spring—. calculus abuts dream, the god who walks lightning naked—. consulting her tropisms, or gathering her courage or whatever it is, she empties her green mind, practices yes, no the bonescrape/ of the vowels inside (even years later she gets the goosebumps of a rising hackles... ) gravity, & the cellular life of leaves happy an aeroplane exclaims labor day the sun swoops oblong: brought up, bang against wheatfields splayed—. absorbing aluminum & dirt, pigeon shit & cherub molt, leaves fall to meet themselves, caterpillars masquerade as petals, in his left hand something wild he caught barehanded—. everything is heroic, lower case, in/ slomo: she licks her lips, bares her teeth. ) more light—. more air—. something furious & beautiful—. her fruitful sins waver, like strawberries in unset jello. or like a birddog demoralized by a box turtle: moaning & emotional. brooding on the corpses of exhausted silos & sliced dead trees a disciple of crows clutches cheetos. a gobbler struts the golden unknown, volcanoes & ants strain enormously—. (& as, you think, for my life amidst Utopia ) his 72 hour human—. a clarinet warbles, spilling fingers. she sweats, smiles, everywhere, gladiolas. a sunbleached military band tunes up in a blossom of rust, making delicate consonant skeletons. black butterflies, a statue like milk. (—oh he would have held her quiet in his big hands a chihuahua chews wingbones, hydrant coloured roses, in a white cotton dress, Juliet represents wonderbread. the baton makes a parabola over mountains of manhair. miraculously: a trumpet. (as if blameless/ like dead limbs budding ) which is when in sthenic desperation,— a tornado of dickcissel mounts samsonite chairs, damaged sad trampoline, wash on the line, a dog chomps water like meat, ethylene ripe tomatoes bend near the limb of the sun. coyotes chatter. a telephone shrieks, turn away. the dream is moving, sometimes with you & sometimes with someone who is not you: like strawberries sprung from buffalo bone, scattering short champagne wavelengths of skin (from the inside out chaos/ begins, skin. ) facts stem the haemorrhage—. bitternut hickories & halved tires make shade. a glory of franks sweat in the rearview. let the father, screamed the devil, let the son, persuaded god. she will come in time. no. I want them all. cholesterol evaporates to ozone, next to a pickup bandaged in indecipherable holy admonition two swans on a sewer pond evolve from gills. I know what you want howls the devil, you are tired of the human, you want to live on sun— you think god begs this flesh is given I tell you she wants to be left/ alone we are in form only so much as the air— toast light rises in smoke, in their changing hands the click of flesh, black ether in a bowl of crystal. lobes of liver & lungs of fat, a single thrilled braincell dripping/ in secondhand— 237 amateurs ) rot to the bottom soil of true belief chickens & dogs enter milky graveyards. a pine tree bounces off a yellow cloud, a weather balloon mounts a lighthouse, an elegant man in a black suit goes out, marking silhouettes. telephones carry words underwater, dreamy, a tendon falls still curled about the other questions. the joint of the bone, a dotted line. in their greasesodden buns burgers fold slighdy over our thumbs, we grow mistyeyed, nostalgic. a wet alphabet trembles in our spine, (what we ate—. who we ate—. & how we prevailed—. ) in the spotless eyes of Sunday: oiled, amorous we discover radium, we dance the swan queen we make incense from the bones of saints. the sea flowers with salt then expires. suburbanites mow strict grass the hero reclines in familiar quotation, mysterious birds soon to appear on postage stamps crane & peer & preen, the sidewalk seems broken, a bonewhite scar, (with milkyway markings & very close/ to diamond morality flops, like the heart of the story beside a telephone receiver, uninstructed, empty-handed. the sun falls on green velvet terrible, glorious, singing—. ) like a goldfish in a gladbag. already the sky is drowning in its own translucent metaphor, gravity is endlessly in ambush, pronouns expand like flesh to the emptiness of atoms, the air is thin & scarcely believable, rain falls in sheets, glazing a red wheelbarrow for the hell of it. the first & last men breed jaguars & gamma rays. a woman sitting in an orange tree kills it to the ground. in our intelligent fingertips, an elegant cigarette exults. telephones ring over navyblue seas. automobiles howl, heredity forms in a raindrop, wavering in dark tongues of satellite & spacecraft, the world—. ) & if hope returns it is another hope entirely—. in fluorescent wounded hallways flimmering with dissolved/ wings, cut fruit glows in glass bowls a housecat flickers flexible & majestic our terribly adult bodies are writ—. like a glacier or a saint, clouds mixed in with some solar systems, ruby goblets of taillight. .. .we want to live in hypothesis, surrounded by parentheses: sullen mermaids, angels washing their underwear, the sea rising, trees singing as they die, & feathers—. ) as gracefully & ripe, to escape—. we are listening to wolves or loons, or forlorn drinking cocacola on leather seats, enormous electric roses disappear in muscle & speech. it is like entering the delicate refrain of a Christmas poem: angels wish on poultry bones, falling stars, birthday candles. a god with too many arms & then one without any has his way with a girl, she is like sweet white butter & he is so coy shebang, three gigantic petrified trees make a hopeful umlaut. memory screams on idiot yellow flowers sliced into frames of window an unfinished birdcry a FOR SALE sign in red. I mean: nothing can be burned & there is no breath. Sunday goes on pulling one thing toward another—. ) like a greyhound pursued to static, or fishy sounds from sherbert strollers. the delicate fin of a fish bewildered in open air, pale cows gended on tended lawn. our breaks into you & yours & my & mine souvenir flowers, beer cans in the bone margin, propeller wings clipped feathers, tears. convertibles bang & snarl, dogearing the hot sullen sun. in the flaming liturgical distance, railroads part like children. a suicide swaggers in a suburban garden plot (breaking this fall, itself falling/ while breaking—. ) the song is a flexible spine,— here, shake. like a patient pink to orange in the failing there is no one world & she approaches it via approximation, an eve god did not intend more, she begs of the less desperately alive. the mammoths, she tells herself, ate marigolds, the tongues of the birds are free of the past, at first, you were nothing not even lonely—. then the light came to contain numbers. men in transit yawn, swim. cumulus cleave into complex molecules of freon, exhaust, inarticulate slurred fireflies, the fritolay factory gorgeous at sunset. a spoon scrapes the back of the universe, she looks into the mirror; there are her lips, eyes mind like a suitcase sprung open a pop anthem between her teeth,— ) up the shinbone superlatives fruit tree & stone mermaid, gun shops, islands of manicured like ricocheting bullets, a string of sparrows up the church of the god of the prophecy. two lunatic indians on a drowned log play frisbee, the brown grasses sing. a woman in a business suit drinks half wine half water on a patch of neat lawn & flagpole. like a volcano or an ant she is wishing for the impossible, she is urgent, being ourselves—. ) you can leave your mark she thinks if/ you leave tying the knot in a fishing line or throwing zeroes around like crazy gods making frantic music inside icebergs trapped in nostalgia & rewind in the lefthand corner dissolving to inebriated cumulus on navyblack blouse of sky subsequentiy that's what we'll be) the dead flowers someone must have hurtled (was it for some kind of isosceles catapult highchair birdcage—. 247 cathedral 248

) not beyond or beyond as after litde psalms make the long song of a steel blade now he joins the woman in the kitchen, the soft places of their fruit touch. her heart makes a wooden sound, pumping. now the light is hyacinth, jellied the ceiling spills memories, all her anguish is in her skin. the telephone stipulates edge, gains it, skeletal notes rise in the kitchen like an empty trapeze her night thoughts pace the room with pearly revolvers on the gossipy balconies the wind makes a sound like wings—. ) between lives & before biography. pieces of jaguar prowl, like black blossoms: buoyant, athletic, sure you can try to break it it/ will break you he says. angels look on, laughing, (with wings; studying the ways of not firm/ feet, they have time, a blue cardinal drinks from the chicken trough, sings. today's moon leans through the window, purses her lips. Venetian blinds thwack. out of nothing: there's nothing at last I can do I can stop/ doing: he is ) thoughtless, a cocked revolver—. turn away, it is almost spring, fish freeze into bits of stars. pinesmoke circles the cutback limbs, automobiles drive with fierce lights on, illuminating thin smoky heroines. a coyote gallops across the third person & the indicative, inclining the two forms of life to the one end, through the bare trees flying naked/ as a ghost, turn/ on that breaking.— as the sound of the stiff bud trees holding/ ourselves to/ (& from one another ...) gravity & skin make mannequins a dog—or is it a telephone? —punctuates butler buildings, some white crosses, the churchcoloured tendony hum. a meteor screams: point-of-leaf, a seethrough skeleton, wrist & thighs, tendons. shiny taillights make sky haloes over feedcorn & flesh. singing, like fireflies. all the vowels are upside down or inside out. deer shiver into fist, a child's shout drowns/ the song. the wind licks the sex of the trees—. ) which is when everything begins/ to hurt: magnolias choir. the sky eats clouds, tries to fit inside a tunnel in a tree. peeling saints argue over toast. treebones come apart in a glass of water. what to do how to do what/ to do. the slur of cars thins & softens. a word like a flat sword, a nail or hairpin—. outside, the ordinary gorgeous oriole. the sheep of snow lay down among the curbs, a helicopter hums low. bird ash in the vast, & your very human heart, pulsing—. ) on the far right side of the beautiful left hand memory, in a fury curling furiously (tongue's blade, eye's ribbon, crouching like a saindy semicolon, tusktorn because too slow to learn a blade of violet sings brimming with inner light; and, sometimes invisible. pearly clouds on the endstriking limb of joy —that belonged to me or him or what wrecked us—. a sparrow panhandles, the weeds crouch, his mind moves, not alone ) a calculus in heaven adjusts a flag flaps, the sky pours like music on the cats & leaves. a pebble ricochets like a shotgun, human nature pours try/ to understand: we were three complete & then we ended. god shines horribly, drinks/ in the dark, like people or flowers. tiny, furious, a bit of time hands from his wrist. a pronoun begins to bleed... ) the body being such as it is like/ everyone else sidebyside two wilted flags (like eyebrows. a diamond garnished with bright pieces of rubbery meat a shadowslashed pulpit a couple of beauty marks, the edge, a colon, giddyup carousel horses & mewing cemetery stones, trees swaying mosdy where they started, ceramic birds mate on glass stumps, appaloosas gallop across teakwood pastures, weather poodles sing idiot radio songs about love. the sky is tattooed with birds in flight. you won't sign your name, (there are too many bones in it—. ) sideways, hoping for backward—. golden fishtails sashay like clarinet glissandos in thigh ivory sycamore, cloud bellies warble, little grass frogs transparentize. a snake uncoils his brighdy shed... (sin is different, a season, a motion, a loss, a state of unredeemed, not listening when—. in the garden going to gown, the fruit leaves weeping two people walking together begin to end—. 257 state of grace ) onomatopoeia of the ebbing—. today's god rises, his long eyes flecked with clouds. he is mad but wont say. sings/ out of die side of his mouth. far-flung, synaesthetic... dogwoods sway, among rainraked weeds. in die sunset of civilization gaudy false poinsettas cheer. a snake or an angel looks back— laughing, wet loose... between the brotherhood & hymns, carelessly evolved & outoftune ... you open your throat, lean forward, concentrate. ) one torn example watery light strays across morning glories & turnips, shines/ down the knuckles of your spine. in a beautiful allegory he says—. (where once without knowledge the low sky rained & the sparkling blue birds—. you take a further step inside that light. every meaning/ he says will be reversed until the last witness—. the patient simmering larches, blank aluminum fields & hem of sparrow, eyes open as stars, saintcoloured. (once (you were so in love you/ didn't know what it was.... later/ crickets beating their thighs— 260

) but to submit to articulation is the beginning of—. the weeds are singing, next to the lutheran church, a motorcycle splutters, clouds scud tree spine, the world wavers about, spilling memories. the wind is like a train/ over violets, glorious in odalisque dome of jeweltoned jello a sparrow twitters. with a wave of his broken rib entering your blood. forlorn crosshatched boomerang knowing/ knowing/ knowing the corn leans right, limbs left, each foot marries forward, fall—. ) chemistry having its equations fierce bells scream against a bent stalk question mark backbone, catfish gape from the grave, somewhere an angel wing (a thought in your moving dream or the still house. blood blows from the stems of air lilies, black skin of close trees spreading the dream wavers, there in the lighteating leaves, meanwhile a twig begins to bleed. electricity hums in your fine arm hairs, you have fallen in the roadcut, like pollen—. big birds in the ripe corn sing... were you cold under sap scrawl he says/ pretty thing ... ) so you come to inhabit your body like music infant flowers, churchcrowd noise & lakemelt in the buckeyes. a string quartet of damselflies in a kleenex box. violet drizzle; wet buttocks; heapedup jewelweed, where the fireworks leave off: mosquitoes resume, a mutt tethered to a leafless trunk, birds fold up. the fields are pooltable smooth, heifers on howling asphalt pirouette, the song cathedrals. the dogwood is turned back remains/ turned, you eat oranges. a cock crows, everywhere, gladiolas. ) cornfield testaments of the unwrapped dead green fire makes a parabola, licks the cat velvet sky. wellwater pours from a stone dolphin. the birds & their litde psalms scatter like flames. in the just July in their saintcoloured clothes, sunflowers choke statues, flower music inside burnt rubber, a white horse, a catjoy clawsharpening. listen. (& if you do nothing/ on your white chair deciding if tomorrow will start on the left/ or the right hand of god (even this will be taken/ from you, finally, as all lies are... ) the riddle was: die slash in die middle/ mountain saucers on a black & white television, clouds of cow flesh, mind magnolias, small birds elegant/ on a white plate, one self he insists is not/ the way to live meaning cicadas churn in cemetery flowers, the planet on the table sings. you go on your orphan feet making perfect/ euclidian chalkshapes. some of the houses all in a/ row are stuck together no space between them, black fish like music, all the flowers are following the high prairie sky. carefully you spread/ your wings & try—. ) like the giant stones of macchu picchu combines dance with daffodils orions belt crocuses bartalk, birdsong. a beckett tree punctuates the blinding/ green. sin trembles through diin wires: smoldering, unreadable. tornwhite, a butterfly spills out of radio. in the watery globe, makes words. from the vast fields, strange angels, backward flying birds, ruth/ amid the alien corn. the stark flat miracle: all syntax, in the syllables. ) or to begin again dusk parcels out tree roof highway, a flight of spotted turkeys, fleshly warbling clouds, our distorted bodies approach road curling left, eye cutting right crickets beating their thighs, the grass stirs, a sparrow sings, the first beast makes its entrance. we take a further step inside that light without etiquette or influence other than this green hunger—. thrashing itself out among the lighteating leaves the treeline wavers like something proposed then forgotten: holy ghost where does it come from this/ desire, in the throat of language, the glorious unstrung light of June, while the jaguar of sweet laughter—. Works Cited

Abrams, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New-

York: Vintage, 1997.

Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. London: Continuum,

1999.

Baker, David. "The Pastoral: First and Last Things." Baker and Townsend 133-141.

Baker, David and Ann Townsend, eds. Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry. Saint Paul: Graywolf P,

2007.

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. San Francisco: Chandler, 1972. brigham, besmilr. heaved from the earth. New York: Knopf, 1971.

—. Run Through Rock: Selected Short Poems of Besmilr Brigham. Ed. CD. Wright. Providence: Lost Road,

2000. N.pag.

Brock-Broido, Lucie. "Introduction." Letters to a Stranger. Thomas James. Saint Paul: Graywolf, 2008.

ix-xxvi.

Brown, Deborah, Annie Finch, and Maxine Kumin, eds. Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics. Fayetteville: U

of Arkansas P, 2003.

Buell, Lawrence. "American Pastoral Ideology Appraised." American literary History 1:1 (1989): 1-29.

Carr, Emily. "Interview with Carol J Adams." dandelion 35:2 (2010): 24-45. —. to loot to hew <& Eden. Unpublished.

Carson, Anne. Glass, Irony, and God. New York: Jonathan Cape, 1998.

Cobb, Edith. "The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood." Shepard 122-32.

D'Agata, John. The host Origins of the Essay. St. Paul: Graywolf, 2009.

D'Agata, John and Deborah Tall. "The Lyric Essay." The Seneca Review. 28 Sept 2009.

.

Daniels, John. The Far Corner Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature. Berkeley: Counterpoint,

2009.

—. The Trail Home: Nature, Imagination, and the American West. New York: Pantheon, 1994. de Laurens, Teresa. Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1984.

Dorn, Edward. Gunslinger. Durham: Duke U P, 1989.

Duncan, Robert. The Truth and Life of Myth: An Essay in Essential Autobiography. Berkeley: Sumac,

1973.

Durand, Marcella. "The Ecology of Poetry" Ecopoeticsl (2008) 58-62.

Eshleman, Clayton. Juniper Fuse: Upper Palaeolithic Imagination <&the Construction of the Underworld.

Middletown: Wesleyan U P, 2003. 269

Firestone, Jennifer and Dana Teen Lomax, eds. letters to Poets: Conversations on Poetry, Politics, and

Community. Ardmore, PA: Saturnalia.

Fraser, Kathleen and Patrick Pritchett. "Patrick Pritchett and Kathleen Fraser." Firestone and

Lomax 59-82.

Gander, Forrest. A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, Transcendence. Berkeley: Counterpoint P, 2005.

Gifford, Terry. Pastoral. New York: Roudedge, 1990.

Gliick, Louise, Averno. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006.

—. "The Forbidden." After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography. Ed. Kate Sontag and David Graham.

Saint Paul: Graywolf P, 2001. 244-53.

Gordon, Karen Elizabeth. The New Well-Tempered Sentence. Houghton Mifflin: New York, 1993.

Graham, jorie. "Some Notes on Silence." McQuade 163-71.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Roudedge, 1990.

"Happily." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989.

"Happiness." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989.

Hawkes, Terrance. Structuralism and Semiotics. New York: Roudedge, 1997.

Hejinian, Lyn. My Life. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2002.

—. The Language of Inquiry. U of California P, 2000. Hillman, Brenda. "A Cadenced Privacy." McQuade 172-186.

—. "Seam Poetics." Shepherd 98-100.

Hinton, Laura and Cynthia Hogue. "Introduction: Oppositions and Astonishing Contiguities." We

Who Love to Be Astonished. Edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue. Tuscaloosa: U Of

Alabama P, 2002.1-14.

Howe, Fanny. The Wedding Dress: Meditations of Word and Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003.

—. The Winter Sun. St. Paul: Graywolf, 2009.

Hubbard, Ruth. "Introduction." Women Took at Biology Looking at Women : a Collection of Feminist

Critiques. Ed. Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifin, and Barbara Fried. Boston: Hall, 1979. i-xii.

—. The Politics of a Woman's Biology. Piscataway: Rutgers U P, 1990.

Iijima, Brenda and Joan Retallack. "Brenda lijinia and Joan Retallack." Firestone and Lomax 255-78.

Johnson, Denis. Jesus' Son: Stories. New York: Picador, 2009.

Kabir. Kabir: Ecstatic Poems. Trans. Robert Bly. Boston: Beacon, 2004.

Kittel, Gerhard, Gerhard Friedrich, and Geoffrey William Bromiley. Theological dictionary of the New

Testament, Volume 1. Grand Rapids: Eerdman, 1993.

Lauterbach, Ann. On a Stair. New York: Penguin, 1997.

—. The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience. New York: Penguin, 2008. 271

Lazar Hank. Lyric and Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-208. Richmond: Omnidawn, 2008.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine, 1990.

Lorca, Garcia. "Theory and Play of the Duende." Trans. A.S. Kline. 2004. November 2010.

Macklin, Susan. "It's a Woman's Prerogative to Change Her Mind." McQuade 9-30.

Macy, Joanna. World as hover World as Self. Berkeley: Parallax, 2007.

Macy, Joanna and Molly Young Brown. Coming Back To Life. Stony Creek, CT: New Society, 1998.

Martin, Calvin L. In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History and Time. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P,

1992.

Maso, Carol. Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing, and Moments of Desire. Berkeley:

Counterpoint, 2000.

McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

McHugh, Heather. "Moving Means, Meaning Moves." Brown, Finch, and Kumin 277-8.

McQuade, Molly, ed. By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry. Saint Paul: Graywolf, 2000.

Mullen, Harryette. "Between Jihad and McWorld: A Place for Poetry." Poetry and Pedagogy: The

Challenge of the Contemporary. Ed. Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr. New York: Palgrave, 2006.

Naess, Arne. "^^Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World." Seed, Macy,

Fleming, and Naess 19-31. Nielsen, Dorothy. "Ecology, Feminism, and Postmodern Lyric Subjects." New Definitions of Lyric:

Theory, Technology, and Culture. Ed. Mark Jeffreys and William Cain. New York: Roudedge,

1998. 127-49.

Olson, Charles. "Projective Verse." Human Universe and Other Essays. Ed. Donald Allen. New York:

Grove, 1967. 51-61.

Partridge, Erin. Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. New York: Roudedge, 2008.

Plumly, Stanley. "Pastoral Matters." Baker and Townsend 148-154.

Ponge, Frances. The Voices of Things. Ed. and Trans. Beth Archer. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.

Rabkin, Eric S. "The Brothers Grimm and Fairytale Psychology." Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind:

Literatures' Most Fantastic Works. Audiocassette. Chantilly: Teaching Company, 2007.

Rankine, Claudia. Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. St. Paul: Graywolf, 2004.

Rasula, Jed. This Compost: Ecological Imperatives In American Poetry. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002.

Retallack, Joan. The Poethical Wager. Berkeley: U of California, 2004.

Robertson, Lisa. "How Pastoral: A Manifesto." Brown, Finch, and Kumin 297-300.

Sales, John. English Literature in History: 1780-1830: Pastoral and Poetics. London: Hutchinson, 1983.

Sand, George and Gustave Flaubert The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Lutters. New York: Book Jungle,

2009. Santayana, George. "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy." Selected Critical Writings,

Volume II. Ed. Norman Henfrey. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1968. 85-107.

Santillana, Giorgio de and Hertha von Dechend. Hamlet's Mill. Boston: Gambit, 1969.

Seed, John. "Beyond Anthropocentrism." Seed, Macy, Fleming, and Naess 35-40.

—. "Introduction: 'To Hear Within Ourselves the Sound of the Earth Crying.'" Seed, Macy,

Fleming, and Naess 5-18.

Seed, John, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, and Arne Naess, ed. Thinking Like A Mountain: Towards a

Council of All Beings. Gabriola Island, BC: New Catalyst, 2007.

Silliman, Ron. Ron Silliman's Blog. 30 Sept 2002. 28 September 2009.

.

Shepherd, Paul. The Subversive Science: Essays Towards an Ecology of Man. New York: Houghton Mifflin,

1967.

Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild: Essays. New York: North Point P, 1990.

Strand, Mark and Boland, Eavan. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New York:

Norton, 2001.

Swensen, Cole. "Artist's Statement." Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative

Poetries. Ed. Reginald Shepherd. Berkeley: Counterpath, 2008. 231-32. —. "Introduction." American Hybrid. Ed. Cole Swensen and David St. John. New York: Norton,

2009. xvii-xxvi.

Thompson, Jon. "Interview with Susan Stewart." Free Verse, 2003. January 2010.

english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/Spring_2003/interviews/S_Stewart.html>

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. New

York: Harper, 1985.

Turner, Victor. The "Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Piscataway, NJ: Aldine Transaction,

1995.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse/The Waves. New York: Columbia U P, 1999.

Wright, CD. "Introduction." Run Through Rock: Selected Short Poems ofBesmi/rBrigham. Providence:

Lost Road, 2000. N.pag.