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  • The Orthography of Provocation, and: Between Two Men, and: All Day I Dream about Sex
  • Laura McCullough (bio)

[Erratum]

The Orthography of Provocation

I wanted a cement truck in this poem, but didn’t have one, and if I had there

wouldn’t have been room for the tree I was trying to grow, the one made

of cells which aren’t the smallest unit of meaning or even attention, but a cell

will simply have to do. All of us are perturbed and perturbing, the perturbations

sometimes lovely as birds lifting from the head of a tree in unison or lovely, yes,

let’s admit this, as the rumbling nostrums of that cement truck grinding down the road [End Page 36]

past the old, grand trees lining it, the flocks of birds all provoked from their rest. We

take flight, too, feeling palliated momentarily, and you take my hand across the membrane

of this poem, and, for a minute, I understand the word placebo and am grateful to be stuck

in it, rooted once more to the only street on which I’ve ever known how to live.

Between Two Men

Among the bamboo’s slanting stripes I glimpse The tiger’s stripes and sense the bony frame Under the splendid, quivering cover of skin.

I was walking on Nassau Street in Princeton on my way to freshman convocation in the church by the sculpture of fear

and forgiveness: two men, one kneeling, hands bound, the other standing with a knife in his hands; what’s between them unknowable,

but obvious. I was waiting for the procession to begin. There were African drummers, air socks in the shape of fish, faculty, women

and men of worship wearing crosses, stars, symbols, and colorful robes, and then the president, Shirley, bringing up the rear [End Page 37]

and six hundred new students, but I was thinking of dead tigers, bright skins confiscated in airports, the wild laid out on linoleum. It was in India,

a poaching campaign, and all the reserves were decimated, no tigers left to hunt, beaten to death in their leg traps so as not to mar

the hides, cash on the black market, money in pockets, blood on machetes, but none of this new. The sculpture of the two men

is black metal. The light catches the concaves and convexes. The students scurried by, their eyes as open as possible, catching all

of it: the heel of hand on skin-head drums, the flying fish, their belief in immortality filling the air like incense or blood after a kill.

All Day I Dream about Sex

That goat. You love that goat more than you love me, more than you love your wife.

—Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I’m trying to say something as clearly as I can, like this backronym for Adidas which isn’t an acronym at all, but portmanteau. The owner is Adolf Dassler, nicknamed Adi— you see, Adi Das? Then someone made up:

all day I dreamed about sex. That’s funny, but how about all day I dream about soccer, [End Page 38] or socks, or sweatshops, or Sudan? There’s a difference between compression and tension; the former a reduction in volume; the latter

the relationship of force between two or more things; how far can you stretch a string before it breaks, or a country, or a teenager who makes sneakers, or the one who’s willing to knock another one down and kick him in the head,

so he can steal the shoes off his feet? I wanted to say something clear, and all I had was ears so full of letters and words: k’s, diphthongs, sporks, and cyborgs, trying to neologize the collision of them or find someone to blame for my

dumbness. Consilience doesn’t mean sentience, not without a certain self-awareness anyway, more than it requires to tie your shoelaces. Is there a word for it yet—to imagine what’s beyond the break, living on the taut string?

Laura McCullough

Laura McCullough has three collections of poetry: Speech Acts (forthcoming in 2010), What Men Want, and The Dancing Bear...

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