Two Poems by Frances Richard
Today in the PEN Poetry Series, guest editor Maggie Nelson features two poems by Frances Richard. About Richard’s work Nelson writes: “I have been convinced for some time now that Frances Richard is one of the most riveting, rewarding, challenging, and important poets writing today; I have also long suspected that if I could articulate exactly how and why, I would be a better thinker and person for it. Sadly this intro isn’t the place for a full elaboration, so I will just say this: Frances’s poems lay waste to distinctions between cerebral and visceral pleasure, political intervention and aesthetic innovation, natural and the human-made efflorescence, while offering all of the above with astonishing plentitude and exactness. I am continually edified, bewildered, and nourished by their swirling vocabulary, their severe insistence on the interplay of form and content, their obscenely keen understanding of narrative, appropriation, syntax, and sound. I think her poems make magic of the highest order, as her new book Anarch., just out from Futurepoem, makes clear.”
Universally Accepted Definition
i.
Out of the wind-shirred depth-stripes
in the ocean we could hear
the dolphins cough
Verges of sensate trigger
me, they push
against a membrane quondam toxin, explain
erasing as a way of knowing, tending
to discredit by an act of non-address
Move the object back to cover an unseemly
rip in spacetime, open
portal sucking stellar wind
The idea “instinct-injured”
helps explain, and the rule “reverse the image
of porosity”—feel happy and so violently
porous. “Last night,” you said,
“I was killed twice by goblins,” and I coalesce
all afternoon as container-ships
from Chinese-painting fog, egg-yolk sun sets
into ashen clouds—I know according
to this cliff. Dolphins insert a character called
space. Beside the freeway in the salt-marsh, two herons
raise white S’s
in orange parasitic moss to spell
semi. Dry stellate burrs, the dead computer monitor face down
embracing squelching inter-hummocks. Who brought
lawn chairs, mute tesserae like crashing
through the lilies a swamp-bred prehistoric fish
some nine feet long. Like soapy water emptied
on the ground. How every blade of grass
bends whispering please
please. Their sound performs a cloud of gnats
entrenching in some mist some sun allows
ii.
Who felt upwelling, thought you might
be steep exercise, like a mountain. Lay in bed
in the midst of electricity
and sleeked my muscles and folded my silent brain
to feel the dolphins’ surge, which is not
mediate. The question was, is
this a landscape
or a portrait? The answer was phytoplankton blooms
can or used to be seen from space.
The question was “a person
has a billion dollars, so why cannot a mountain
have a billion leaves?”
The answer was there is no universally
accepted definition of “a mountain.”
Outtakes
occasional peace
be more
“the character of your daemon is
responsible, solitary, modest, shy, and proud”
timescale in muscle
sonic concussion
walk out into an oncoming wall of sun
softening asphalt like a tar pit, or that time I thought the moonlight
made a sound
and still withstand it, lithe stripe of mid-percussive
lathe of outwash
grinding, churning, filing down
the grassroots justice community temporarily
ingrate, convoluted or trying to have pleasurable friction, coefficient of biolocation
waft between
matter at least is not private
a hundred thousand kalpas is about right
cream, green jasmine tea
Citron Mélisse
potassium, silicate
I thought it said I want to wash the ocean
bend the edges of old trance but that was wrong
a narcissistic
wound I stupidly shrunk
my favorite sweater
contents of purse or pockets, dans mon sac
what it’s like to have some money
a tocsin, Klaxon, water
or the sweetness of a dog
Kleenex like a used-up dove
frisson
there is no end
there is no end
one version of this only creates happiness
earth-movers across the street
festooned with colored ribbon while demolishing the notions & trimmings warehouse
your secret history of ye olde dividing line
a dividing line sans secrets
as if each person
on the subway could be honored like that guy facing down the tank
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