Carrie Hunter

 


“The Orchard That Was Right for You”


Setting: The Water.
Shawls, a wharf, a rope, a password.
Smiles are a pattern you wear indicating a dagger.
An outfit, an ensemble. An ensembly. An assembly.
Acquiescent demands. The water a place
to be pampered. The setting not a specific setting. 

The coded language of a region inaccessible to the uninitiated.
What we think we know, but we don’t. 

Always confusing deictic and enclitic.
Sinkholes open up cleverly disguised.
Everyday mundane questions; another summer
coming to take its hand from the sun. 

This is a land memoir.

“Fish tales” is an idiom that means the fish are speaking.
Bluetoothvegetables.
Talking in specifics around a nonspecificity.
Pointed accusations coming to
take their hands from the moon. 

Not a space for stopping to think or reconsider,
but something to fall into and be lost forever in.
“That odd, dank furor of attention.”
No sense of time rushing past or other people’s sense of time. 

Being the pivot, but stopping just short,
but being adorable. And in the shadows,
the memories of everyone else
who’s ever looked down into 

Rivers, basins, lobes, deposits, locks, and levees. The Gulf.

Wishes that are shadows.
Wishes you never remember.
Wish’s decline a sort of wholesomeness.
Animistic wish flying but no longer a wish, a bird.
A list of things that are fresh or might be. 

A word that reminds you of a previous crisis.
That moment after a sound reverberates.
Negative striation.
We look for a beginning in the wreckage. 

Verdancies profligate.

 

 

 

“Nurse of the Arcades”


Question of whether we are at shores or gardens.
“there there,” she says, or “there” —> pointing. Deictic.
“It nourishes other asides it knows nothing of.” 

I don’t want to say what comes after. Dancing
after, sidestepping what’s passed, is still passing,
passes over us. Tedious crossfading. 

Something to escape, or something to escape to.

“My fear is like a small house: you can come visit me/
but it will not go away.” Passing through as a sort of
departure. Something is always coming loose in the poem.
Chilly, unripe fruit, timeless or nonspecific time. 

Being put to the test, but not now, sometime in the future.
For now, some non-test activity, or battling the weather.
[Not at a] pinnacle of some decision or other. 

“Haint” blue, whispers of taint, it is and it ain’t,
what taints, is tainted.
 

Psychics who are right.
A list of metaphors for building something.
The city and the city’s lair.
All lives have battle sections.
Definition of the one and only in horticultural terms. 

“They handed us over to it/and we were alone.” 

The battle scene leads to the Arcadian scene.
The animals, pilgrims, defeated, supplicants, bushes, virtue,
an antidote. The domens, a joke, a centipede, morass.
A beast, a lair. Apathetic wondering. 

An unnamable coherence. 

Love’s crescendo, but inside a fermata.
Fear’s wall; a depression.
A man walking his dog with a dog ball launcher,
and I say, “That man is walking alone holding a single flower.”
A bird is screeching outside my window. I ask, “What is that?”
He says, “An eagle.” 

“No center, only the circuit”


 

 

“I’ll Wait for You Until the End of Time like Everybody Else”
 

No part for you in the play.
Crashing water systems.
Supertankers, cotillions.
Tone-leading structures leading us no one knows where.
Stiff-kneed, a stiff one needed, or a few provisions later,
the momentary stopover. 

“We make it up as we go along.”
Seeing what everyone else sees
for what it was, and that it was a charade. 

Knowledge not guarded as much as it is carried.

No tigers, just paper-thin characters “revived,”
a wider denouement. The forces we forgot,
low-lit in the back with the torn wallpaper,
move further back into the shadows, altar to the sun. 

“Too late for pie.” 

Writing verbatim lines in the wrong order.
Nature taunts you, but you only know
what it’s doing because it’s done it before,
will do it again, so you just wait thorough
for the next one. What is beginning
is what is disappearing. Confabulation
of waiting.

  

 

Erosion, ice melt, the reduction of land to an island.

Every day is like Wednesday. Hump day
you never get over, so you write lists, write list
poems, write your unhappiness, sort out the living
that must be got, or must be given, that which keeps
the rest of us disconnected, the board barrier diverting
traffic. You disconnect. 

Outsider’s guilt. 

Your misery is my breath, my misery your breath.
Barely worn, hardly on. Those who can tell what’s coming. 

List of vegetation. List of endangered animals. List of flavors. 

Like Christ’s still here, like a leap’s still drifting on. As if all
you want is your heart scorched, but no one will give it to you.

 

  

 

Notes:

Lines in quotes are taken from John Ashbery’s “Flowchart,” unless stated otherwise.

Italicized lines are from or inspired by Marthe Reed’s posthumously published “Ark Hive.”

Lines that are both italicized and in quotes are also from John Ashbery’s “Flowchart,” but italicized in his text.

 

 

 

Carrie Hunter received her MFA/MA in the Poetics program at New College of California, was on the editorial board of Black Radish Books, and for 11 years, edited the chapbook press, ypolita press. She has published around 15 chapbooks and has two books out with Black Radish Books, The Incompossible and Orphan Machines, and a third, Vibratory Milieu, just out with Nightboat Books. She lives in San Francisco and teaches ESL.