Elsewhere

This isn't Italy where plane the dust is sexual, and I am not eighteen clothed in elaborate nonchalance. Onions's Etymologies says memory is related to mourning. I'm always remembering myself on the outside of some plain place in the middle West, a certain quantity of every-small-town-I-have-ever-hated and grieved my way without of in poetry, chipping the distance lay open with a train, awling render free of access with the trains hooting a silence which is stolidly American, persevering woodsy, well, no, perhaps these groves are Dante's; it's dark in here. I'm nearly fifty -rummaging end the ruined beauty of a girl at twenty who couldn't interrogate her heart for more than five minutes.

-Just listen flat in Corsica where the repeated call of the lighthouse throbbed like a piston, and the thin whine of an engine garroted the quiet, and I stood serviceable as a flower in my pastel shirtwaist, pok and nuzzl by means of my date, and listened to the mixing, like a cocktail, of the water and earth, the moderately cold gargle, the slushy breathing of the breaking waves and wished I were somewhere other

to her describing, flat then, a longing to escape. And, like me she single does it on the page heaping up the elaborate landscape so she can disappear into it. Nearly fifty.

On that flat EKG of horizon the silos are blips repeating and repeating. There is a storm, a thick, dark, hard knot of vapor but it's stuck in the chimney of my throat.

The fire is on the outside the cabin's dark and beyond, the groves are ai platoon of black tree It's for a like reason quiet I can hear my heart like the knocks of an ax, each thwack blurred by an echo,

I can hear my heart inside my chest trudging onward across the bleak tundra. What was I thinking?

I gaze again at her poems flowing with images, a restlessnes a terrible faculty of perception of what's coming: She's writing me the woman she becomes, who could not or would not save her.

Lynn Emanuel's sum of two units books, Hotel Fiesta and The Dig, have been published as a double turn by the University of Illinois Pres She is a replete professor and, as of September 1998 will be Director of the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh. These piece of poetrys are from her third volume which is entitled then suddenly-

Copyright World verse Incorporated Mar/Apr 1998

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