OUR ANTHEM
by Laura Neuman
While I am drawing a line in notebooks
leaf
getting redder
2 figs
for Muybridge’s horse
the bust,
wobbling
meg knocked into it
room’s big though
the Xerox
in poor condition, the ink not really
uneven, just
evidence of an unreasonable request
that
carefully regulated breath, two decades of it
men
leaning into a century under lamps
specimens
shipped in rotting crates cross multiple
seas: materials
can’t make a clean escape to be thought through.
this is greg’s piece but it’s the
same dancers sara and k. use
I said
the problem was proximity
I was
trying to be close to them their work
writing
is obedience in the notebook I was
pretty
sure, you
can look at the wrong things too long and
burn out
your receptors so what is left for our
friends?
The horse
is telling two stories about time.
One is
familiar to us, involves flowers in the desert
the car,
natalie and nick sneaking into tents, there are
three of
us then two. The other story is the wrong story
but much
more compelling.
You can get
stuck using the wrong
medium,
long for a car chase instead of a surface, you are
a kind of
adventure story from the “wrong” kind of space
bypassing
the culture for the jugular breath
the day
we make laughter from musculature only
but have
to make up a way of being present in another city to do it
then all
the cities Thinking you are writing
drafts
no you
are rehearsing for an activity that is or may be called
“writing”
maybe you have to give your notes to
someone else to
write it (thanks eddie) or wanting to step
to the other side of a diagram
“I stabbed afacing and came to relation it”
This is
textual this is having a textual body inside other ones
we change
clothes to meet, a new sweater, articulate a space
in which to be someone who can be near they
are doing this now, but how to keep it straight, whose rehearsal is this? oh, greg’s –it’s easy to tell
It is always
okay to violate our terms, now
for
instance, kinesthetic vs. kinetic
a
panther/line or notebook is soup for what is outside you singing you
Whatever
is outside you is singing you always.
K. used
Busby Berkeley videos to make an anthem so the person
watching
could be Busby’s camera or eye, we are arranged around that or maybe the
surface of our body is one side of the glass platform, real and virtual
movements from diving girls sliding along us, but you have to leave room for
the audience to fail at watching, it is a glorious thing to walk into the
crowded
theater
in the afternoon, wrappers crackling
hits New
England again and again, I’m not
despair
saved for friends in letters on surrounding continents
all the
leaves in their exact copper scoured are
safe
now we’re practiced to keep
all these
months in the line
coming out of the movie theater in the afternoon
the sun
falling onto a used diagram
who is falling,
who is privileged to be a falling body
we can have
a falling body together
whatever
it is you have gazed at too long, goes first
I will go out into the world and
think of you, I
said
again and
again, I will go then bearing gifts: a hat of the finest
blues, a dressing room mirror, some kind of
tea but I
don’t I don’t think of you, I think of what we had
made
or
scoured, of things on tables lit by lamps.
I think
we practice
for years to get to a place we will be
by definition, contingent
I was pretty sure I could.
Laura Neuman is a poet and sometime performing artist living in Seattle.
She/xe is the author of a chapbook, The Busy Life (Gazing Grain Press,
2012). Some of hir poems can be
found in The Brooklyn Rail, EOAGH, Fact-Simile, & OmniVerse, and are included in the forthcoming
anthology, Troubling the Line (Nightboat
& EOAGH). In a former life in
a very different city from the one she lives in now, she was a co-conspirator &
performer with The Workshop for Potential Movement (www.potentiallymoving.org).
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