Oops – recorded the wrong title in the reading (named it as “Closing Hours”, which is a different Lauterbach poem)… too lazy to go back and fix it.

Not That It Could Be Finished
–Ann Lauterbach
She holds a conversation with her ornaments,
stray or contingent, heaped in patches
darkly and then loosened
onto the table to be consumed.
Collect me, they seem to ask,
into an assembly; construe us
like any morning onto any day.
Bring us forward notch by notch
into a paradigm of comfort
to be clasped: any cup will do.
Any dance? Take a seed
and blow it toward the curtain
which, like a bright shield
hugging breasts into radiance,
is seen and spoken of and desired.
Will any silence fit? So many
columns of air are held upright
in inebriated passage,
so many paper stacks
brittle under the weight
of what was news to attentive readers
as zones of holy strangers
feed through tunnels their imported cares.
Stare at us, they seem to say,
we are windows propped up against the sky,
quotations of light waiting to sail
into your aperture, calling because because
and now now now. And the good body
is pulled over the original rapacious body
like a huge sock, its cornucopia
of sour wind and dust emptied into the firmament.