Sara Burant
liminal
notes in a secret pocket
skritch-skritch-skritch no one hears except maybe
the skin’s indigenous microbiota sensingsensingsensing changes
in the temperature field
& still the moon
growing more alone
a more-or-less blank spot
& you knowing where to step so as not to__________
knowing what to avoid & whose invisible static
a blot pulling usually from the left the left sorry doesn’t seem to be so very_________
only to
to move
to move out of the way
tsch-pp tsch-pp tsch-pp night-skitter night-skitter’s repetition
letting darkly ( of fearfulness ) go
the boldness of that
Thrum
( 1 )
In Albrecht Dürer’s 1496 etching Die wunderbare Sau von Landser
the pig has one head, four ears, two bodies & tongues.
Two braced forelegs keep her from listing. Four hindlegs support her unwieldy back-end. Legs seven & eight reach up from her shoulder blades, bending at the knees as if wanting to sit her upsidedown in the sky.
Dürer, in Nuremberg, “relied on verbal descriptions of the sow born on a Landser farm,” the good people reading in her arrival a sign of something dreadful about to come.
But the artist’s interest lay in the body,
disequilibrium finding momentary stasis
before pitching solidly into
oblivion…
Such care taken with legs that never knew ground, knee joints & muscles—brachialis, extensor carpi radialis—precisely cloven hooves.
( 2 )
A dwarf I half-recognize brings a crimped
& fluted pie, its very red interior
flecked with yellow seeds. The secret
he confides is to tumble it in a clothes dryer.
(The watcher watching flinches, suspicious of the knowledge the dwarf possesses)
No, no, I assure you. Agitation is required
to make the thing exquisite he insists, taking
my bent little hands, spinning
then tossing us both in its heat.
A dwarf I half-recognize brings a crimped
& fluted pie, its very red interior
flecked with yellow seeds. The secret
he confides is to tumble it in a clothes dryer.
(The watcher watching flinches, suspicious of the knowledge the dwarf possesses)
No, no, I assure you. Agitation is required
to make the thing exquisite he insists, taking
my bent little hands, spinning
then tossing us both in its heat.
( 3 )
Clouds speak a landscape, bruised tones
that could be a lake, a field or simply more
sky, possibilities I people with horses,
whole eras living inside their exhalations
Shshshshsh…
Clouds speak a landscape, bruised tones
that could be a lake, a field or simply more
sky, possibilities I people with horses,
whole eras living inside their exhalations
Shshshshsh…
The future is a drum we might-could make talk— In the book of spells, when the word is just right
The last part of their story might be thought a little sad
A good week is she dries & puts
away a [silent] circumference
that [who] swallows them both
a clock announcing the minutes
aren’t sleeping but pacing, recounting
she won’t get up, doesn’t want to
break them
*
Between summer’s sweaty bottle & later’s hoofprints in snow he’s to be found beside the former in a chair, talking with the vague but persistent huuuuuuu a wind [or a fly] [or she] is making in the glass throat
*
It amuses him to mimic
[her] a drip drip drip
she must [internalize]
& fall asleep to
glacial diminishment
the soft gray dirt of
a high stony place
holding [prints] until
it hardly ever rains
who follows whom to
he says he’ll risk a
solo climb & because
[she won’t] there are many
as in mountain lion cougar
Puma concolor
names for one thing like
sunlight licks the ice
like the creek comes
to life watching her
less afraid of [him] falling
than of being left
alone out here over & over
her mind sketches
rock-voices all night
*
Saying so little of consequence she [might just] merit his lapses in taste the caricature [the other] her speaking in dashes & squeaks
*
Remove the time
[markers] & she
keeps approaching
pressing an enormous
hand over their face
a shallow grave
waking in a tent
thinking she’s awake
a hump on her back
a hump on her back & snorting
*
The map no one hands her is blank, directionally speaking she does not pretend to be not-lost, looking [to press] outward, full-up, bud-consciousness that must hint at the purple of was [still is] tender beneath his skin
*
Under her tongue she
keeps yesterday’s
[stone] otherwise to wade
through an immensity
like glue
The table wiped of
every trace
her mind gathered as gaze
quiet with [a hint
of] frantic
antennae & wings
just emerging from
the larval closet
population vector or cloud
finger tornado over mons
& clit only she
touches [herself now]
the cry as if it belongs
Sara Burant lives in a yurt in Eugene, Oregon. A graduate of the St. Mary’s College of California MFA program, she’s the author of a chapbook, Verge, and new poems too numerous to count. Her poems and reviews have appeared in various journals. She’s committed to process, radical revision, giving her poems all the time and space they need to be realized. Current work resists narrative and arises from an awareness of threats to both human and non-human communities posed by climate change.