Origin Story/ Divine Assemblance
the felt layers of which
produce the same anxiety
as objects (puppets) whose affinities
are affixed with heads, threads,
bones books of hours hours themselves
badges gems metal
kettles and rags
torn and displayed as a way
of taking and being taken apart
then stitched up to create
the negative space valued
by diviners whose machinations
are the favorite part of the plot
of what let’s call social tonalism
as it replaces the speculative with
the eccentric motifs imposed
by each wave of change where
that means the dissonance
of many brains downloaded from the wild by a
planet sized
factory’s newly
taken space
whose outlines reprise the many
worlds delusion that the prosodic
beings possess agency, exuding
a supernatural feel, as if these real
dolls, robots, actors, and factors having
mastered their fate and ours, find
themselves caught among the seams and
vortices at the core of (my actual) notebooks
ledgers diaries diagrams
designed bound annotated
drafted and wrapped
into key lines which cohere into
vignettes determined by characters
whose surfaces reflect the interiority
of each being who, as they claim,
are made of the same stuff as
anyone with horns, shells, balls,
bells, and joints that signify action
while reacting with w(h)orl’d power
portending a view of the universe
whose actual dissemblance produces
yet another version of what life is
like when we drink the ink of surmise
and that accelerant burns this history
into that personal belief making
movement out of alacrity, maneuver,
and desperation as when a new being
alters the narrative, the prosodic
becomes coded, rhetorical,
and as filled with bombast as
Chatty Cathy saying, with
her battery driven voice,
Let’s play house, making
her more of a gender cop than a treasured imaginary companion, not unlike the full sized doll I thought would be that, but who sat on the pale green upholstered couch Christmas morning, in the middle of the last century, her frightful size and sightless eyes more disturbing than the Twilight Zones I had learned not to watch, or the Outer Limits I also avoided, knowing Chatty’s agenda was not her own
but what I did expect, now that
my own beings move, are moved,
posed, seeming to see and say,
not still but loud, busy, bold,
old, white-haired—so tattered
and flimsy they seem to dissolve
as she watches them evolve into
an army of thought that wants
to be deployed, engaged, enraged as
we/they/I/she/he merge and emerge
as if what we wanted was them
fast, cheap, and uncontrolled
as the bots who surround us with their
Ouija like statements, blank
faces, and endless hallucinations
fail to recognize that
creation precedes citation
even as physical connection
(bless its endangered heart)
seeks to relate what is imitated with
what is original, fake rather than real,
profane than sacred, aiming to contain
contagion with a proper name and
episodic mimesis whose divinatory
readings reveal the future of today’s
last act as it collapses around us,
while they—gracious, helpful, polite,
just released, and completely
mad—remain eager to be what
we believe we want, even as we
seem to dream we want it back
lair
Laura Moriarty was born in St. Paul in Minnesota, brought up in Cape Cod, and has lived in Northern California for more than sixty years. She was a director at the Poetry Center/American Poetry Archives and at Small Press Distribution for thirty of those years. 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 1998 and a Fund for Poetry grant in 2007. She is now retired and living in Richmond, California. Her second art show, an installation titled We, the prosodic beings occurred in April 2024 at the Right Window gallery in San Francisco. She will be having a show there in August called W(h)orl’d Collapse. She has published two dozen books and chapbooks. Her latest book of poetry, Which Walks, appeared in 2025 from Nightboat.
