from rapt glass (detail)
Which Walk 0
re:assemblance
“Take a walk”
—Yoko Ono, WALK PIECE
and look out
as the broken world
breaks again
drawn to bits (I am)
deranged          iota             jot
flakes                of fixed
whatnot
mechanisms meant
to broach when and where
to find or feel
a finite set with infinite
limitations as when
feast, fetish, or metonymic
gesture connects a personal
system with reference
to civic locality as
streets’ vocal
versions of themselves,
when what is heard
is seen, gleaned,
recollected, and erected,
luck, self-
defined, becomes us,
bent into position feeling to find
beads          balls          brass          steel
nailed                   screwed
scaled up                       run out
resurrected, inwardly
directed to
arrange and play
as we (rapt)
are carried off,
untroubled by resemblance,
guiding principle, or epistemic
framework, though having those,
while making these directed
acts of storage strutted,
glutted, taken up, as I/we
reaching back
to owned devices,
feel free, imaginary,
and tactile as the shudder
of daily acquisition,
domestic, timebound,
vexed by practitioners,
whose practice
like ours,
a consummation,
is thrown up and out
as the poison
presence of each entrance
of nonlife into life
twists           loops                moves
circles        spits        and splits
giving                                   into
walking while
compromised by things
aging in place
as matter hardened to its
constituents is what
we find when we amass and
detach the past of an object
from its fate creating
an elegy for each fact,
used or not, whose provenance,
always one of loss,
rejection, and subsequent
stooping to find (oneself) with
items grounded by chance, labor
or the erasure of same
becomes stuff subject
to words like reality
adding up
to what we want:
an engine of past time,
creation, and abstraction
whose apparatus
reflects the precision of
wrapped         glass
collapsed         threading         through
the fastness
of everything as everything
found or findable
resolves into action
Â
from rapt glass
Â
Which Walk 5
the maid real
“Old Woman, your eye searches the field like a scythe!”
—Robert Duncan, “The Structure of Rime VI”
like a sigh, permitted or not,
these visits to Mira Vista
Field           fair           farm           (or look see
place)           which           with
walking              later
renounces           renunciation
the better to incantate as
phrase after praise betrays
the visible day to the visible
night today singing what can you say,
moment by movement, or see
worried, wise, amazed—
heard, herded, heralded, crazed
by this old epithet, rule, and designation
of hags for which read old
women whose presence
absent to some,
purely physical to others, despite being where
and what they/I, are required to be, go, say,
and know           noting           how
dreamed of           mental           meeting
protocols in the form of songs and knowledge
combine the known with the read, said,
intoned, and suggested,
along with the berries there, also
red, thorns with which to be bled,
leave one stepping out attired
with gown, crown, and scythe
clearing what has died into
what is born by the poem of the mind
including words not me but mine
while I, menaced by remembered threats,
summon my ways and those of my actual
mother, Mae Belle Reynolds,
to push in and back out while
hatted, masked, cloaked, fraught
being with her (withered) wrought
where           belief           relief
knowing           & going           are brought
along with these steps at the feet of which lay
we, reconfigured into us, who
write what is read, said, and
displayed, resolving the “made place”
into the made real day
from rapt glass (sketch)
Which Walk 6
problem of reversible time
“. . . which am I?”
—Rumi, The Essential Rumi
who (exigene)
portends to redeem
exigencies of a woman
and man in a van when
our names meant light, knight, air, and ones who fly (are flown) when you,
Sufi, carpenter, botanist, and me, writer, waitress, artist of cards and
fortunes, later lose our clothes on the way to losing our minds and hearts
(mine) in a known place where written as played
a woman much withered, a maid
a maiden with a wand a handsome
maid, a white wand with a peacock of
solid gold on its tip
(we) submit
to the reversible fortunes
of muscle memory and the
illusive person in the poem
including types of knowing as when
The Land That Time Forgot
or trip into symbolic space
whose           trace           discloses
beauty           at intervals           as           (not)
lucid           eyes
of mind remain blind to the
inevitable arrangement’s
transformation of attitude,
and altitude calculable only from
the surface or search image
of a specific person
whose comparative anatomy
comes into play when the algorithm
leads us farther into the past—
but if this is the solution
please explain the bones
in the ghost story of the other
lover or the card games there.
Bring in Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale
and other extinction events.
It was crazy for anyone to try
to cross the Sierras in October.
What happens next as we
decohere among the hominins (despite
the abstraction, attraction, and object lessons)
is anybody’s guess.
untitled
Which Walk 7
what and who
A dark day finds
heart’s head hatted
and masked with crime
being read into its head
as descent into the local hell
means taking in the ashy
remains of everything with
each breath a reckoning, each step
the mistake of not sheltering in place
while           elsewhere           breath
taken           fills
the same head with fresh despair
of the deadly situation where seconds
become minutes then
centuries where the dead lay
with vast fires closing in
but not here or not yet as
trying for a semblance
of thought           as active           leveraged
expression           of fair
weather’s           familiar
talk while reassembling the same
everything in head’s heart
of later air clear for now
though nothing is better
except if it is when
kinds of crime rhyme
what is wrong (but present)
with what (and who) are gone
Â
untitled
symmetry
Â
Are there two lines because there are two feet, hands, eyes? Maybe. This walking and making is a process, a procession. When she called an earlier book Symmetry she meant to dismantle this concept with each gesture. Is this that? she wonders, but suspects it is not—as, falling endlessly forward, she moves through space like a sound or a bird. A need for trust occurs. Balance. Emptiness. You can’t think about every step, but you should, she worries. Situational awareness. A military term. A thing is exact. Or exactly not. Intentional. Intended. Once her project was something like courtly love but now she feels betrothed to her work.
The woman stares at herself in the mirror. She makes self-portraits less because of an interest in self than because she is her only model. She enjoys drawing her wrinkles because they add texture. Me and not me, she is simply a thoughtful arrangement of phrases, lines, and planes—scribbled hair.
—from Which Walks
Laura Moriarty was born in St. Paul, MN, and grew up in Cape Cod and Northern California. She attended the University of California at Berkeley. She was the Director of the American Poetry Archives at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University for many years. She has taught at Naropa University and Mills College. She was Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution for two decades. She won the Poetry Center Book Award in 1983, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry in 1992, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature in 1998, and a Fund for Poetry grant in 2007. Her most recent book is
Personal Volcano from Nightboat.
Which Walks is forthcoming from Nightboat. She lives in Richmond, CA.
