from "What Now?"
How is every giant lunatic today? Drawing a picture the
eye opens. Eye draws,
here you are, three trees
in the snow, little cone-shaped
shrubby trees slanted as
a border for a driveway -
neighbors. No more
neighbors.
One friend is writing
winter another
is pounding copper
and there are plans
and plans to march.
The bees are sleeping, another reports.
We eat some things in the city where
he has no car but many
hives, no boyfriend
at the moment & is 68.
I don't know how to assemble
it any more - the pages and
words. Where are the notebooks
Notebooks - who knows?
Where they are,
what they say. Can you
hold me in tensility?
Say words
Says each word
~
When the picture's broken the frame collides
I love you they say without music
Oh now it's over where were you flower?
Time, rhyme.
Today is December
last line is X =
Today is December 1st 2016
Today is ___
X = Y
Death is = ___
X Y
Today is Dec. 1, 2016
I did see that leaf.
Missing the play.
Then the election.
Today is
Death is
tumbling out in a rush
"self-harming"
story of life in a time
~
Night Skiing
at first in the junipers
hemlock & spruce
the poem needs more space
than at first
~
Full moon if I could see it
where we said we'd be
one fine birth
That in a letter
said a round lie
who won
time word orifice
a day before 50
go away sun &
come around a little more
~
Truth-telling is possible, thought Laura Riding, so the poem does not need to happen. That is, poetry should not exist. Rather, language should speak truth in all ways. Not in a separate realm, a special form, called poetry. Poetry existing as a separate category prevents language from speaking truth outside of poetry. Her decision therefore: No more poems. Write a dictionary. Where is this dictionary? Florida?
~
I was aware of a headache developing despite very rarely getting headaches. I thought about X who came in and out of the time and I let it go. I remembered doing this before, and first doing it in 1995. I believe I pictured both of those rooms. At one point it was hot. I think I thought of one student's two descriptions from the first time; her name started with T, and of another student's a few years later. I think her name was Brie. She had 4 or 7 toes on each foot, I noticed when we went outside.
~
not "using words"
a way of being in the world, not extracting something from it
an interaction
~
the Five Ways to jump
the seven breaths
one pair of longjohns
the wine dark sea
the problem of 2016
~
Spring goes down
writing does too
sludge and muck
& sleep destroyed by hysterical birds
Who needs to sing at 4 a.m.
Riding says not at all
~
Michael says the poem will speak
to an unknown addressee
the poem escapes what it means to say
the poem's being in the world
~
Almost trying to the sun I'm eating that I feel or think, going on without or also a cardboard box for this interior and about to hear someone shifting, lying down to say I'm thinking, in relation to the underworld I'm still my postcard from Brooklyn not on time I've finished the arson thing off to the right.
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Author Bio: Lisa Fishman’s most recent of six collections are 24 Pages and other poems (Wave Books, 2015) and Deer 1, a hand-stitched booklet on Oxeye Press. Her earlier books include F L O W E R C A R T and The Happiness Experiment (Ahsahta Press). New poems appear in the final issue of 6x6 and are forthcoming in Emerald Tablet II: The Book of Formation. She is a dual citizen of the US and Canada, lives in southern Wisconsin, and teaches at Columbia College Chicago.