Shearsman 51 Carrie Etter Six Poems from 'Divining for Starters' Divining for Starters (5) circumnavigate boxes of forgotten letters preserved with a reverence for the past and pretend fire, pretend catastrophe, you must dispose let the present to its work—comparable handwriting, that cologne, a particular kind of anything but all the pluck and ample of reinvention all my hands redone   Divining for Starters (6) Begin photogenic. Implicitly or explicitly posed. Consider lighting: reckon degree and exposure; the differing sensibilities for sun, fluorescence, candle, all provocative, all other-wise. Surely you have one or two props: a book, a stalk of blue delphinium, the severed mouse-head a cat left on the step. And relentlessly, inescapably: the face. As this is not a photo, per se, the tilt of your head, the fall of your hair cannot conceal the mounting expression. You are, after all, the beholder as well as the beheld. You control this frame, and that may suffice. (Would that it does.)   Divining for Starters (8) Admitting the ultimate arbitrariness of origins Or at least their illimitable multiplicity The potential for a new argument to designate a new beginning I reach into the past (I am pretending, as you pretend, that it is not a bowl of sand) I’ve got a thin thread and choice of beads Glass beads, despite what confessional poems urge I’m more suspicious of myself with each passing moment I deliberate over which one I stray from event into landscape, the small field we played in as children, where I felt and felt without revelation, with want more than need or so I now would have it   Divining for Starters (9) lingering in bed to recover the dream’s trace the winding bike path along Venice Beach the smell of marijuana on an ocean breeze and patchouli a leg slips out of the blanket and the chill hot sand and a red sail on the ocean striving for realization the flash of a batik scarf the color of nutmeg and it’s London, winter, weekday, rain   Divining for Starters (10) Bend to crack to rise Who is in writhing Emptied out by the brief night Merely an elision Radio heard but unlistened Retirees’ energetic chatter repelling Stimulants or succumb Into the molten day from which Nothing’s divined but   Divining for Starters (13) scrupulous or not so unwitting you plied me an outdoor table three blocks from the ocean a health store on Montana Avenue where you bought a reading at a Hollywood gallery those were the an act of interpretation requires interpreter and text (momentarily shunning the potential for contradiction) which is not to say that alone the text unravels to wield circumscription rather forging these trajectories made palpable if always more pleasant than (forkfuls of wit don’t call arbitrary) maybe once a year I never touched your congenial if ultimately foreign, if claimed in reverie even now your eyes darken and flash to call this cull this among bygones and we’re even   copyright © Carrie Etter, 2002 Carrie Etter moved to London from southern California last year and is completing a PhD in English for the Uinversity of California, Irvine. Her chapbook Subterfuge for the Unrequitable appeared from Potes and Poets in 1998. (Photograph copyright © Carrie Etter)