Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America

from Utopia (R’s Boat)

358 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century dark, elaborate. October rainy. November floods upward into its referent. December seeks a runnel. A runnel. A limb. A sky. A disburdening. A highth. A name. A rubbing. A fear. A thing. A fear. A tuft. A face. A runnel. An escape. A number. A wisp. A screen. A knot. A mother. A boat. from Utopia (R’s Boat) In the spring of 1979 Some images have meanings, and some have a change in soul, sex or century. Rain buckles into my mouth. If pressed to account for strangeness and resistance, I can’t. I’m speaking here for dogs and rusting ducts venting steam into rain. I wanted to study the ground, the soft ruins of paper and the rusting things. I discover a tenuous utopia made from steel, wooden chairs, glass, stone, metal bed frames, tapestry, bones, prosthetic legs, hair, shirt-cuffs, nylon, plaster figurines, perfume bottles and keys. I am confusing art and decay. Elsewhere, fiction is an activity like walking. Any girl who reads is already a lost girl. Women from a flat windswept settlement called Utopia focus on the intricate life that exists there. What I found beautiful slid between. We die and become architecture. The season called November addresses speech to us. The crows are still cutting the sky in half with their freckling eastward wake. The quiet revolutions of loneliness are a politics. Some of us love its common and accidental beauty. Lisa Robertson | 359 I take the spatial problem of heaven seriously. I look up from my style. How do people work and sleep? At about midnight in Autumn The nightreading girls were thinking by their lamps. The fleeing was into life. It was the same world, the same garments, the same loose rain. It was no longer the end of a season but the beginning. Clean as a tree, a face waits for form. At about four in the morning, that first day Which is a surface? What is the concept of transformation? The intellect struggled to its stanza. The earth spoke in figures. Its pebbles and tropes and vertebrae withdrew. I felt a willingness to enter righteous emotion. I became willing to enter certainty. Then after a month it was the month of July. The soft dirt threw the pink light upwards. The danger of the infinite opened. It was almost dawn in August. A dog yipped in sorrow. By early June, I lost speech. What about the conceptualized trees? What about the phosphorescent sexes that took my strength away? I arrived at the threshold but did not cross. How odd it is to think that a broken pier laced by gulls and kneeling into the foaming pull was once an empire. It is late October. The house is like sunlight. Soft and mild emotions were interrupted by emotions that were eager, hurrying, impetuous. People are fragile and finite. 360 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century Is this an interesting thing?—to be 40, female, in the year 2001? How simple it would be to walk together. It was a Saturday evening. Yes, the future, which is a sewing motion. These are the inescapable vernaculars of the Mississauga nocturne. The effect of the downflowing pattern of shade on the wall was liquid, so the wall became a slow fountain in afternoon. Our fears opened inwards. Must it be the future? Yes, the future, which is a sewing motion. Most decay is not picturesque. For one day there is the sensation that Springtime is waiting for us to walk forward. Everything follows from the sweet-acrid scent of pencils in June classrooms. Every angel is fucking the seven arts. Each leaf had achieved its vastness. A young woman is seated on a kitchen chair, black wings spread out as if drying. It was August and the night was hot. What we were proposing already exists. This is a history of sincerity. The tree uses silence. The three layers of air flood the sky. My face is tilted upwards. I wanted language to be a vulnerable and exact instrument of glass, pressures, and chemicals. It has provided us with a cry, but explains nothing. I understand passivity. But what elegance is self-sufficient? Before primrose and before aconite, after snowdrop, at bluebells, during jonquil, inextinguishably for fritillaria, I stumble in and in. Lisa Robertson | 361 It began...