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Scared Text
THE COLORADO PRIZE FOR POETRY
Strike Anywhere, by Dean Young
selected by Charles Simic, 1995
Summer Mystagogia, by Bruce Beasley
selected by Charles Wright, 1996
The Thicket Daybreak, by Catherine Webster
selected by Jane Miller, 1997
Palma Cathedral, by Michael White
selected by Mark Strand, 1998
Popular Music, by Stephen Burt
selected by Jorie Graham, 1999
Design, by Sally Keith
selected by Allen Grossman, 2000
A Summer Evening, by Geoffrey Nutter
selected by Jorie Graham, 2001
Chemical Wedding, by Robyn Ewing
selected by Fanny Howe, 2002
Goldbeater’s Skin, by G. C. Waldrep
selected by Donald Revell, 2003
Whethering, by Rusty Morrison
selected by Forrest Gander, 2004
Frayed escort, by Karen Garthe
selected by Cal Bedient, 2005
Carrier Wave, by Jaswinder Bolina
selected by Lyn Hejinian, 2006
Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems,
by Craig Morgan Teicher
selected by Paul Hoover, 2007
One Sun Storm, by Endi Bogue Hartigan
selected by Martha Ronk, 2008
The Lesser Fields, by Rob Schlegel
selected by James Longenbach, 2009
Annulments, by Zach Savich
selected by Donald Revell, 2010
Scared Text, by Eric Baus
selected by Cole Swensen, 2011
Scared Text
ERIC BAUS
The Center for Literary Publishing
COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY
Copyright © 2011 by Eric Baus.
Winner of the 2011 Colorado Prize for Poetry.
All rights reserved.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Center for Literary Publishing, 9105 Campus Delivery, Department of English, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado 80523-9105.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baus, Eric.
Scared text / Eric Baus.
p. cm. -- (The Colorado Prize for Poetry)
ISBN 978-1-885635-18-1 (pbk.: alk. paper) --
ISBN 978-1-885635-24-2 (electronic)
I. Title.
PS3602.A97S33 2011
811’.6--dc23
2011037732
The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
1 2 3 4 5 15 14 13 12 11
for Andrea Rexilius
Contents
MINOTAUR STABLE
Glass Ear
Attic Grasses
Spoiled Swan
Mirror Seed
A Delphi
MOLTING SOLOS
The Ur-Mane
The Worm’s First Film
Votive Scores
Canary Aria
Molting Solos
Clone Burns
Eggshell Plumbs
NEGATIVE NOON
Stupid Moon
Glass Deer
Gored Ox
Negative Noon
Urned Braid
An Ember
PUMA MIRAGE
Hornet Fleece
Puma Mirage
Coma Silt
Exoskeletal Gesture
Clovered Ohms
OX TONGUE
Dove Bomb
Migratory Door
Variant Aquarium
Latent Veins
Spiral Scrap
Ox Tongue
Egret Eyes
SCARED TEXT
Scared Text
LAMB COMB
Owl Wool
Dark Sum
Aqua Mange
Parallel Puma
Creature’s Creature
Lamb Comb
Stunned Cove
FLOODED CLOUD
Negative Moon
Swallow Orbit
Feral Dross
Black Beacon
Flooded Oud
Sister Sequence
Deer Tongue
Iris’s Saliva
Common Cloud
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Minotaur Stable
GLASS EAR
Approach the smallest ghost after he has turned his back. A buzz of definition surrounds him. This is the sting of the fleeing beetle. How soon before the house becomes soot? The statue of elderly hornets is delicately connected to the floor. On the other side of the wall an apple hangs suspended. There is no such thing as “There is no ghost.”
ATTIC GRASSES
A ghost’s frost blooms inside a glass vase. But what does the swarming sky do? Why has the sound of a boy disappeared? A not-body, not not beaming, resets. Becomes a bee revived with ether. Booming, ten beetle stings make the bottle break. This is a picture of a boy without a mouse. Being animal in the attic grasses.
SPOILED SWAN
A clod of spoiled swan applied to his twin fails to infuse the ground with glands. The elated bells in his brain have grown knotted. Even the most active worms refuse to gloss the sod. Has the sun repaired yet? How to solve for its abscess? Behind the bricks is a wall of false glass. Follow the trail to the minotaur stable. Be a diorama.
MIRROR SEED
The sky divided and so did I. I watched my mirror seed a cloud. The house rained. Identical heads echoed. A dead oud’s resonance cloned the first presence. An apple in the attic developed a tree. I felt the sun.
I fell into an open field. The clone smiled. I have never seen a clone smile. His snails grew fur. The closest ant grafted the smoke with sand. This is the first piece of wood. This is the first piece of glass. Clouds arranged them behind dead doves. The membrane’s séance broke. The doves died again. The dead doves reset. I arranged them into flowers. I have never seen a flower. I have never seen a dove.
The sky and its stills mated. I have never played an oud. I have never said Bird. O snail, I heard outside. When the first dove died, the ouds ate apples. I died too. My glass fermented opals. The second séance failed, my fur glued to flowers. I have never seen a cloud. I have never looked down. The organ smoked. The clone strummed. I fled, immersed in flames. The mirror chimed. Dove. Oud. Field. The bloomed membrane’s array split. Inside, the blanks bred herds.
A DELPHI
Minus tried to write his own bible. It began, So what, saliva. So what, milk.
Iris told us her dad died in space. The whited-out vowels rang in my ears. Stupid moon. Stupid burned-up blind spot.
The doctors said his name had burned up. We never knew how it sounded.
*
The city refused to see my brother. He banged out his nerves on birthdays. I use years, and they remember.
This was in the annex of the indivisible.
Escape your leaves, Minus said. I said, I have never used camouflage. It felt so good to lie, all that noise loosening inside me.
I like lies.
*
The burned-up hills had grown more graceful.
I like hills.
They feel like hands.
*
When I wasn’t looking Iris re-named her tongue. Hey, Solo Swarm.
Her questioning pulled. Why are you always floating?
She said she tried to sign my name but the ink was immature. Stupid minutes.
*
The city wasn’t looking. This city wasn’t old enough to look.
The city said, This
city isn’t old enough to say.
*
Minus told me not to breathe when the doctors floated by. He sat on the floor and covered his mouth. I hid behind the blinds.
This was in the entrance of the opposite pharmacy.
Minus’s bible began to speak. Hey, Solo Swarm, it streamed. Iris’s saliva was turning sharp, straining itself through her teeth.
*
In the organs of her father’s owl, Iris heard half of her name.
My brother threw a brick at its head. He was helping his cells divide.
Iris scratched the city’s face with the keys she had in her hand.
Whatever the opposite of prophecy was was what I was listening for.
*
The city decided to follow me home. Can I ask you a question? it said.
I put my gum in the subway slot to keep it from saying my name.
Hey, Owl Boy, can you hear me? Hey, Mister Face, what’s your name?
I would like to be called A DIFFERENT HOUSE. I would like to be oxen and bread.
*
Minus water. Minus air. Inside the house with a tree growing through it.
I woke up alone with my feet in the branches. I woke up behind the sky.
The doctors took the needles out without removing my sheet.
Iris was outside holding her breath. My brother had floated away.
*
The city appointed a second owl to see if my brother had drowned.
The owl was sifting the blanks in our herd. The city was clovered in sound.
I like noise.
Iris likes space. She thinks it feels like snow.
*
My brother returned from the burned-up hills. He contracted a diffident voice.
Whenever I asked him a question he branched. He woke up outside his breath.
*
Minus’s bible was reading itself. All those invisible vowels.
Crossing out the sky, the landscape stretched, moving the apex of the so-called.
An inverse tone accrued in my tongue. The octave’s egress bruised.
*
Iris awoke with wool in her mouth. Grass grew over her eyes.
The doctors thought she had seen the bad wheat. She will need a second reading.
Minus’s blindness spread to his hands. His fingers were starting to slow.
*
Inscribed, blighted, tongue filled with snow. A throat so other I entered my name.
The blotted-out passages hummed. Beetles bloomed underfoot.
This was in the attic of a different house.
I slept throughout the stings.
Molting Solos
THE UR-MANE
In classical buried-birth narratives, the immersed egg frequently feels both mammoth and absent, sedated with seeds. It says, A cataclysmic dial is upon us.
THE WORM’S FIRST FILM
Two horses climb a hive. The plumage around their waists retracts. I ate mace, one thinks. No one knows I ate mace. His mouth repeats a top lip twice. Don’t tell my brother. Please.
A still shows his core is a molting eel. It ekes some light then glows back in its hole. It grows glass from its face. It sleets.
No blinking, he says to himself, through his peel. He blinds his own ivory with the finest lamps. Does he seed a dot of blood? Do his teeth feed leaves? Clouds polish him plush. This is the last fence, dust.
VOTIVE SCORES
If eels lie vertically inside the statue or old bees coat its surface, a needle will point to the center of my hide. Owls murmured up a piece of green cloth. Hard ash topped me. The birds it entailed peopled the treetops, stripped me of my coos. Un-tuned doves flew elsewhere, worried their drones would shrink inside my ears. A second split occurred when its eyes bloomed red. Votive scores pushed open the view. Here, the street was both omen and throat. The swarming sky sparrowed until day withered, until the statue punched out of its skin. He was wearing his own arms. His house showed. Ants formed and he scorched their trails. Sing rendered. he trilled, Sing posed.
CANARY ARIA
When a canary’s aria dredged the fringe from a drowned colt, it inherited its way of breaking apart. Differing is one long moment. We cannot divide its songs.
MOLTING SOLOS
The first pair of giraffes is the most metallic, but the captive asp in the center of the nest alternates between solid and signified knives. One grew blurred, and must be resisted. Look at it. Look at its tongue. Imagine the back of the thought that it crosses. Why was it so difficult to picture a bird?
*
The intensity of elephants should continue beyond the title and merge back into the figure of mud. This lion is, therefore, like the lion following a marionette. Here, their passage is called brothering moss, and elsewhere, the hand that distinguishes between rains. Each finger implies another flame.
*
Although there was a bird chirping, the emphasis was still on the ground. New likenesses assemble an absence, an audience of dissident listening, each of their faces quoted, quilted, singing A SOLO FOR SWARMS. The empty sleeves their ears become wander, rehearsing inside of a herd.
CLONE BURNS
A cod ate itself. A cod ate itself and in eating itself dons a clone. The clone burns. The burning clouds. The cod’s cloud burst into throngs.
EGGSHELL PLUMBS
Blurted, The Ur-Mane erupts, combs through growls to the coarsest salt. A thimble full of eggshell plumbs the egresses for slits. I listen for the second salt, to two horns: locked, alloyed. A moan inverts an ant, burns out in bursts. Its lisps form pools, stinging ice, clips of aberrant grass. See how green I can be. So stirred. A stem empties a range of sheep. A still invents its scene. I plead with all the strays to heap. A shark in a mason jar, scared. Such smooth. So screen. I cut to a tree.
Negative Noon
STUPID MOON
Whatever poisoned wave stands to block its beginning. Whether torn dove or stunned moth. In the bind. In the polished blank of a sun. How faded our horse is, starts.
GLASS DEER
Here is how to hand a glass deer a beetle. Here is how to bind the bloom over its mouth. The sun a moth is in a strong clot of ether blinds its antlers. It hollows its ears. Inside is the song a twinned flute splits. A silent gong. An elongated stitch.
GORED OX
A man with a lantern buried the tail of a gored ox in reddened wool. Both sands said this. Minus inscribed, Bathed in salt, a new bus arrives. A cold fit. Should wood be laced into the scene as ash? Embers hot, he saw another fold of the vellum effect. Would his story sleet? Was the elemental udder set to speech? A flayed colt, Iris interred the oration of a thorn. She saw inside the funerary soot. He was tainted to depict the birth of a thrush. He was an only arson, an anvil inside. Iris was cited in cloud position, as Ibis. Ibis, twice the size of a flock. An enemy of ices, her urn became a fish. Had Ibis’s urn contained a clone? The story striated, swallowed an asp.
NEGATIVE NOON
Oxen are bad.
Oxen are bad? Minus adjusted the clone’s hand. The hand grew cold. I heard his oud die. Dead, bad oxen.
His shoulder creak caused a sting in my ear. His modes merged, formed a team. Aphid wounds make the house hurt, he said.
My gut needs cake. The seared core tugged. I spoke my title and he hissed: Do not impinge upon my robes. No tent goes untorn.
More glint, these beasts are ill. An abbreviation for beaten.
*
More gongs, enough to tear the room apart. Minus decoded “f” with theater pins. Divorced the curved curves chords have.
How would Iris play the hollowed-out end of an ark rack? we hounded. Iris wandered out, assaulted by doves. Teal caskets.
“f” is a forlorn purr. It beguiles dull sentries. The rooms in the fort fit together in a series of steel forgeries. Vials emit a mist of yes. If the clang from the hall revolver dies, hordes unite inside tombs.
His snores blow out lamps. Lest his lungs grow hot.
*
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These nests end. These nests end, he blurred in his sleep. The cobra button broke loose until his cell glowed negative noon.
Winding the loom like an idiot ant, I tried to reverse the topiary trap.
Day hissed and our teeth tuned in. Our dirty arms got sunny. Quills dragged tongs across our names. I died to walk away. My dead doves reddened. Their puma leered while the coos waned.
Medicine stored in their breath became bulbous. Was cud coalescing?
The story stormed. The shorn grew gills.
*
Only Minus’s halo remained. Can helium herd? Could aluminum clot? Beastlessness disturbed the din. O corn, we cried instead.
Doubled eels loomed, but what I fished for was a hiss that talked backwards.
Deep in the inert clouds, an analogy splits. A cold sardine awakens. Amber anemones flower shards.
Scared Text