Lisa Lubasch



Ordering Things



Examining the orders of things leaves us confused about their sequences

Is looking also seeing into the desire?

In succumbing, are we letting the words

            go into their borders, or are we

Marking the value

That we have ingested?

 

In the seas, an inclined figure

The will toward

Tracing the path, the will to retreat

From a netting, under the birth of the tendency

To seize it, seeing a form.

 

 

**

 

The sunlight, parsed

 

Such a fraction is part

Of the mutating scheme

 

This is the part we call

Back, and call

To, in and around our entrances

What the saying words

Did.

 

 

**

 

A desire,

With its corruptible energies,

 

Is recorded within

The traceable form

 

not merely

            straining toward devotion or sentiment

 

            ——

 

   Grasp us, and make us see

            a given desire

 

hurrying over

              the performance.

 

 

**

 

In this we deliberate, marking various degrees

            of the day

That stands on the horizon, as a value

 

What words lead us, secreting away

our form

 

Perceiving the value as

            the sequence

Of efforts, without delimiting them

 

Keeping a course, not hurrying

 

All this, inwardly, through a desire

along the fissure

A name occurring, in time with the event—

 

By the by,

 

scripting a scene

 

These actions, not necessarily

            synchronous

 

ever moving into their forms,

 

as desires

            shaken of a subject—

 

All the while, the evaluation

            turning, leaning against the frame.

 

 

**

 

Looping the actions through

Is one way to amplify a future, though perhaps

not the only way—

 

In one version, a woman crawls into a vision

            and stays there, indefinitely

For three years, she summons the question.

 

 

**

 

This is one way to redemption,

 

to describe the form of a given

            desire,

 

generating the question

while opening the measure

of the response.

 

 

**

 

Even if looking and seeing are   

                                                sentimental

 

There is another motion in awareness

In other words, calling up the question or sustaining it

Requires us to generate a judgment,

 

To name the thing, not merely to refute

one argument in the context of many

Arguments sustain us, but they may also keep us

 

Although the proof does not necessarily insert itself

These motions redeem, as we live them out.

 

 


Ordering Things, 2
Ordering Things, 3
 



 

© 2003 Electronic Poetry Review