Rae Armantrout
Décor
Left Behind
Décor
1
Drinking tea to
pass time;
growing leaves
to pass time.
Concrete wall –
the arm slung
round this
cafe patio – is
studded
with uneven
stones.
2
Ground cover of
pert
green hearts:
mass market.
And these
hot-pink,
splay-petalled
pinwheels –
such toss-offs!
3
Already
it’s started
again
with new bodies
inflected
differently
so that most of
us
will end up
loving
some dated
version,
feeling shame
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Left Behind
1
To reinvent
anomalous
figments.
Twisted and
white, limbs
strike poses.
One ballerina
after another
on point
down the highway
meridian –
eucalyptus
committed to
attitudes
just so
but still awash
in their own
equivocal leaf
shadow.
I pass as if to
pass
were to think
better of something.
2
Dreams unspool
contexts
with an ersatz
tongue-in-cheek
familiarity,
conspicuously
flimsy:
a singer
intoning “Venice Boulevard”
on a store sound
system
late last night,
a crooner
placing us
perhaps among
flight students -
reminiscing,
“when you’re
land-ing
on Highway
Fi-ive”
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Noted American poet
Rae Armantrout lives in San Diego, California. Her Collected Early Poems will be published by Green Integer in early
2007.
Copyright ©2006 by
Rae Armantrout
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