Friday, November 4, 2022

Lori Anderson Moseman : PIN [pen] (for Sarah Mangold

from Report from the Mangold Society, Vol. 1 No. 1

 

 

 

 

                                                              i.

Mangold [Sarah] taps me on the shoulder
pins me upon the skins of creatures

suddenly    peephole    nostalgia
suddenly    a widower + a witty crone + a mail carrier
         
      + two other poets + me [paid host]

         
      wait for Rich [Adrienne]
         
      who will read for us live

         
      tomorrow… we might, tonight,          (become surrogate daughters
         
      trill our tongues without naming       (for our weeping mail

         
      string birdsong to stars                        (carrier delivering love notes       
         
      stitch wild constellations                    (she herself never receives
 

but           manners demand we follow    
         
      the bereft widower to his domicile –  
         
      ghostly overstuffed cabin: raptors                

         
      share the ground floor with rodents.
                taxidermy chatter ushers us to upstairs'

         
      prize fox     the witty crone certain
         
      we will find his wife stuffed too

now          Mangold shows us his mate
         
      there in fauna’s placement

         
      in predatory relations
         
      their sewing hides

     
markets awaking
         
      the allowable departure

         
      from actualities       see it
         
      an index of her sensitivity tidy

         
      workroom’s order iridescent
         
      randomness of fatality

 

 

ii.

[Sarah] [Adrienne]

 

every specimen fact retracting
like vision     we choose to know
her landscape              or not

occupied places      perfect bound postcards
in want of a fox    briars of legends
 

this snail could have eaten the monster
this snail could travel     sleepwalking
could have dreamed it was a painter

an unconscious drive        burnt yellow eyes
lacerated skin                            sharp truth
 

putting up graffiti         now      ancient
patterned vision ridden
to move in on backhanded fear

to enfold in a protective        hand-         shake
a vixen’s courage in vixen terms
 

skin recital an accidental                  masterpiece
no   not accidental             scurrying attention
magnified              attentiveness

ontological tricks to slip        the normal
into the birth-yell of the yet-to-be

 

 

iii. 

                               a grid of permanence
the book instructs how to make
a strong winter sun with a cork

when masking fluid is not at hand
                              
some nicety will be required

remember what this color pencil cannot do
too much force too little spit

paper shreds back to pulp
                              
whipped white silk

on cold press, “obliged” the only
word blurring “turf as a rebirth”

dehydration kills most swiftly
                              
an ordinary fire

if only there were a tray
with little troughs for washes

Naples yellow and vermillion
                              
to change immediately after death

#12 brush makes a whole horizon
a continuous sky where air still hisses

in the room where mother sleeps
                              
bent into diverse attitudes

her nasal mask often out of place
each day inching toward the finishing

nap a lesson in low cloud mist
                              
perishing the keeper

soon her coma will blue her legs
she will merge and soften

a thin wash of rose madder
                              
devotion to the task at hand

hospice concertinas
the diorama the window

is less and less

                              
her wilderness her body
 

 

 

iv.

permanence
a weak winter sun
masking fluid
 

nicety
too much force
paper shreds
 

whipped
 “obliged”
“turf . . .”
 

ordinary
only there
little troughs
 

immediately
air hisses
           
mother sleeps
 

bent
out of place
inching
 

perishing
coma blue
rose madder
                              

the task
         
less
         
less

 

 

 

Wreading Sarah Mangold’s The Goddess Can Be Recognized By Her Step (Dusie Kollective, 2014) and Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners (Fordham University Press, 2021) with Adrienne Rich’s “Sleepwalking Next to Death,” Times Power: Poems 1985-1988 (Norton, 1989) and the title poem in Fox 1998-2000 (Norton, 2001). Weaving in, too, poems I wrote when my dying mother was in hospice.

 

 

 

 

 

Lori Anderson Moseman’s latest poetry collections include Darn (Delete Press, 2021), Y (Operating System, 2019), Light Each Pause (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), Flash Mob (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016) and All Steel (Flim Forum, 2012). Her collaboration with book artist Karen Pava Randall, Full Quiver, is available from Propolis Press. A former educator, she ran Stockport Flats press from 2006 to 2016. See https://loriandersonmoseman.com