Preview of Patti's New Book: AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE

[L French <lrfrench>]

I just got a copy of Patti's new book AUGURIES OF
INNOCENCE, and it looks to be quite a beautiful
collection of poems. Of the the 26 poems it contains,
I'm only aware of two which Patti has recited before,
which are WRITTEN BY A LAKE and THREE WINDOWS.  Here
are the titles of the 26 poems:   

The Lovecrafter 
Worthy the Lamb Slain For Us 
Sleep of the Dodo 
The Long Road 
A Pythagorean Traveler 
Desert Chorus 
Written by a Lake 
The Oracle 
The Setting and the Stone 
The Mast Is Down
The Blue Doll 
Eve of All Saints 
She Lay in the Stream Dreaming of August Sander 
Fourteen 
Birds of Iraq 
To His Daughther 
The Pride Moves Slowly 
The Leaves Are Late Falling 
Wilderness 
The Geometry Blinked Ruin Unimaginable 
Feromenico 
Three Windows 
Our Jargon Muffles the Drum 
Death of a Ramp 
Mummer Love 
The Writer's Song 


Here is the text of WRITTEN BY THE LAKE, as Patti
first performed it in March, 1996 at the Warfield
Theater, in San Francisco with Oliver Ray on solo
guitar. This version differs significantly in several
areas from the new version Patti has included in
AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE.   

_________________ 


WRITTEN BY A LAKE  

New years day. Rain. Two white candles illuminate the
room. This is where they sleep. He writes. She
confesses. this is where she weeps. She is the cause
of the rain. She would not stop weeping. and the sky
obliged to follow, did. 

(How is that mapped out? What is the refrain? Why must
the sky follow?) Is the heart hollow? Sinking in the
center of a bottomless lake. And I with time as her
lashes. Pretty vain pool. The heart plunges merrily.
It is deceptive. How light it appears. Yet in truth
how weighty a thing. This powerful stone carved in the
shape of an organ with chambers pumping. How slick a
shadow it leaks as its signature. Sticky, ox-blood,
the color of new shoes. High topped, golden-laced and
worn with such expectations as to ride out life on
horseback. Racing from hill to hill with humor,
horror, bits of English, Spanish stitched in sleeves. 

Look you radiant wash yard. The sheets billow. The wet
folds tell these stories. Once there was a girl who
walked straight, but she was truly lame. She walked
upright in new boots, yet I tell you her feet were
bare. She walked and she lived forever. Yet there she
is, buried in a vault of fertile air. 

And if he, slipping at last should rest his head
against the glass, releasing beads of warm spittle
from his sleeping mouth, parting as if to speak. And
if she, shaken from her torpor, should rise to write,
what would she write? It is nothing. These fragments.
Soft as ash our nothing, size for want of blood, for
here, blood is composed of sorrow. A wound is the
temple. 

Your fingers press the door well, naked, triggering a
spring exposing the hard corner from where you walk.
Had you stumbled, offering a palm, encasing rivets,
extracted from the wet pallet. This time or that. Had
you pricked the hours hand. One would have said with
nothing but eyes. Think nothing of it, for what
remains to flush is nothing save salt jamming the
mechanism of formal delights, former misery, nothing
save salt to form in a mound. A bundle to fling over a
shoulder. And would you be bitter? Or would you think
nothing of it? And some years later would you toss
rivets like dice across a board of dampness and grass?
And would sit upon a ledge of stones circling a low
glowing body unfastening the dressings of a gone
burden, the cremation of all my sorrow, spread the
grains with your fingers and without thought brush
them aside from a board of glass, thus free to drown
in sorrows of your own. Immerse yourself in a
stillness flanked by translucent hills, one a mound
that serves the people as a mountaincoated,
immaculate wreathed at the throat with beads of cloud.
These things were written by the lake. 

Do not grip a sword, nor draw what might be drawn for
wisdom is a dying bird, encased in a palm. A roving
eye nestled in a cheek, pure as yourself, next to
nothing. 

These things were written by the lake. That is to say
before existence as existence was scripted and dealt a
pack of lies. Each with a winning face, each with this
blushing command. Prick this, this moment the hand is
free, wrapped in a fragment of cloth, the cremation of
all our sorrows, lucid as the knots about a neck,
caressed by a sun, stiffened by a wind, and let go. 

_________ 










  


		
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