Another Obituary for Poetry

Relic of the present, this
Frond-green and still a-bristle
Suspicious, indeed,
A post-mortem before the death

Who will inherit? I'd ask
Were we in a Victorian novel
The detective's gaze askance
The clues under our fingernails

What's not on a billboard
Misses the census
(Find the day's vanishing point
And tell me again)

Divining for Starters (16)

Out of the vernacular as the sky drains of light
The body heavy with a day's work that gravity
What would it mean to aspire to transcendence?

The garden more lush with encroaching darkness
The slight tremble of branches, call it a knowledge
Not the self—think of consciousness as steam

Dispersal and absorption; possessive adjectives aside
There's no knowing if willing it makes it so
Pooling again, with the drain and tremble

Something of appetite, of sensory reach
Cleave to, cleave from, believe what you will
Gravity grows lush, reassumed, pooling

Ginger

ginger remembered on the tongue and fingers run the smooth wood plane

always beforehand the lying-in-wait, the dissipation of possessed activity

where I devolve into the flux of emotion and instinct welling

concatenation by fragments of memory and possibility

ruptures with the elusive, the encroaching foreignness of illegible gazes

salvaged by those blunt instruments words I do like the knotty handles

to see you is to yield to you the blaze of moonlight on the dirty river

enthralled with and without discernment gingerly my fingers

 

Copyright © Carrie Etter, 2003

Carrie Etter moved to London from southern California in 2001 and is completing a PhD in English for the University of California, Irvine. Her chapbook Subterfuge for the Unrequitable (Potes and Poets Press) appeared in 1998. Her work has recently appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, 10th Muse, and The Times Literary Supplement.