Monarch

Those of us who survive are waiting for normal life, believing in the idea, though everybody knows from months of TV that the wait has extended impossibly, like a line in space or a rope stretched beyond all capacity. We see signs. Who doesn’t want some small thing to interpret? A dumb movie plastered on a fresh billboard, the diesel stink of a packed bus. Everything seems to announce itself. We’re eating at intervals now, mimicking what we know we were used to, but there’s no escaping nostalgia for old irritations, crowds and short tempers, anything to get a rise out of somebody. No one is willing to be rude. We assure ourselves that things will change, we will change. For a time we can serve as our own confessors. But even now people are on street corners, hugging themselves and speaking to no one or simply the air. Just last week the monarchs fluttered in from Mexico and left as quickly. In a northerly direction.

ARACHNE 0002

to start is     always hard     wind seizing

            a single     strand of silk     extruded

                        keeping it     till it sticks     to a branch

 

an anchor     then the line     paced over

            each passage     a tensile     accretion

                        the primary     thread     needs to hold

 

an orb’s Y-     shaped netting     the first three

            radials     the distance     between them

                        small enough     for crossing     the length of

 

the body     being     the measure

            but whether     the structure     takes form as

                        a funnel     or tangle     sheet or dome

 

            it must be     fortified     the drag line

                        laid down     for safety     in the air    

Ekleksographia #1

January  2009

Poems

Elisabeth Frost

Elisabeth Frost is the author of The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry and co-editor of Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews. She is an associate professor at Fordham University. Recent poetry has appeared in HOW2 and the finale issue of Electronic Poetry Review. “ARACHNE 0002” is excerpted from a collaboration with the visual artist Dianne Kornberg; the work will be exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2009 as part of “The Poetic Dialogue Project.”