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In the Present and Probable Future
- Wesleyan University Press
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Mary Jo Bang | 27 Mickey thinks. He turns the corner. To the gift shop: ever open. He buys retractable mother-of-pearl opera glasses As a present. Yes, it’s over. The present. In which you discovered forward-thinking thought. In the Present and Probable Future Here we are viewing the land: waves of grave and grain. That slight tremor? A house settling. A violent past walking through. And over there, the burning deck. The political machine. The inanimate come to life. The conventional flag wave. Cormorants on pitched roofs watch the ship of state mandate folded Twice over. Many ingenious lovely things are gone. This turbulence. This Coming one-two march through a landscape created. The dark relative against the brilliance of the last act Of some staged production. The cast bows. A tape player click, click, Clicks. Some kind of clock. A unit of measurement. We wish ourselves back on the boat. Wish for the answer To the question: When should we walk out Of the theater into the night? When should we accept that life is only An exaggerated form of special pleading, romanticized 28 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century Beyond saying into moon, stone, flock and trees? What in the picture would you get rid of? The land that stretches back To prehistoric times? Myriad islands? Ice caps and etcetera? The atmosphere? The human body? All of the above? All but the latter? You’d like to keep human as an aspect of the formula But rid it of its grappling ambition to destroy? Good luck with that. What does it mean to have a point of view? What does it mean To have a notable achievement? To succeed in representing The nuances of a determinate activity? Listen, however events turn out, if we want we can continue to see The image of the moon as an outburst of lyric, a vision of John Keats And his friends, but we still have the battle to fight. How many more days will be there? The unperceptive will be busy Believing in magic: crop circles, the unmanipulated image, definitions That defy definition. Others will take at face value the less favorable Consequences of both cynicism and commercialization. The latter will say the flock is simply an assemblage, An obsessive presence looking down on the building where someone sits Predicting the landslide rate. Long after we are gone We can say we were here. We were working, wittingly or not, [3.15.5.183] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 11:37 GMT) Mary Jo Bang | 29 Towards the eventual erosion of places ground down And fought over, especially in the literal sense—exploitation And industrial damage. Nothing is lost. If anything, we gain Experience. There will be that unsullied moment, down to the last Detail, when the acquired interview and other quaint signs of demise Will speak about us to the flood and the fire. from the Mrs. Dalloway series Opened and Shut She had prepared a looking-glass: hair, dress, thought, sofa in the glow of dogs barking. Beautifully close up. And once, flames eating the edge of the sofa. Her eyelashes blurred. Chin, nose, forehead, some lips. The cheek. The glass looking first at one thing, then another: nose, eyes, evening. She sat looking at the map of her hands. The window, the clock, her pulse. The body was busy thinking, conjuring the museum of a moment: emotion, scenes, people, bags of treasures. Heaps of theories. ...