secret arrangement

now that you're disappearing
for another time
my secret arrangement
has begun to collapse

the unspent poems
come out as distillate
the things I swore
not to say
for both our sakes

now that you'll be
in that other land
older with its hints
of your first life
I become free and afraid
your leaves fallen in my attic
your lycanthropic eyes
peering from unused pages
the ones in the white box
which serves as a coffin
for this secret
arrangement


Alison Gaughan went to Ireland with her sister in the mid 1970s. When the chapbook, LNFS, was first printed and put together Knoepfle decided that certain things in it had to be fixed and he had three signatures reprinted, including one for Alison who had thought better about an image that apparently identified her own father ("the amputated man"). These changes were wrought and there was a party at Scarritt to take apart the chapbook, collate in the new signatures, and then re-bind them. Afterward there was a box of the replaced signatures that I couldn't bear to throw away. I put them in the attic on Scarritt where they stayed pretty much until we moved and then I disposed of them, but not in a bunch. I burned them in the backyard at 223 East Scarritt, one sheet at a time, for a couple of hours. Lakebrink was sorely amused.

old & remembering

it seems to me
there was a promise
broken in dividing
these years

my mythology
searches out
its failures

the cool breath
of central air
plays on my hands

in the distance
I imagine
being saved


This is my all time favorite Alison Gaughan poem. It comes in response to a poem of her's published in Light From New Steel. In that poem the narrator is lying in a bath, feeling the air from the vent and she is afraid to open her eyes because she might be only 'old and remembering.' The first stanza reviews the actual complaint: she made me a promise and then broke it. The second stanza codifies it as my own failure. The third stanza recalls her own fear. The fourth stanza breaks from her and sees some hope in the future. Also this piece is similar in structure to the Who song, I Can't Explain, which I have always admired for getting so much done in so few phonemes.

apostasy

tired of your frightening illness
and its mortal implications
tired of being reminded it doesn't matter
because we are all death anyway
tired of your excuses—being avoided
in favor of the smooth flight plan

my nerves are arabian horses
the day is dirty—gray clouds,
no rain or snow. on the mantle
your polaroids, instantly lost,
just another image of your face,
a ghost, deception of light & self.

tired of suffering for your
interpretation and its mistakes
tired of having trusted you
and tired of your constant betrayal
tired unto dying—anymore of you
shows only negative in the wrists.

(AG, for whom this piece was originally composed, was a serious photographer the first five or six years I knew her. The chapbook Sangamon Poets published of AG's work, Light from New Steel, featured several photographs taken and developed by her. This accounts for the numerous references to light and image that shadow this and other poems from this era. She was pretty good, too. Although she was a better poet than photographer.)