Carrie Hunter
Repeating the Oracle: “Repetition Makes Reputation”

This section is about beginnings.
But also returning,
which might be the same thing.

Maybe next spree. The full decade.
When you go out shopping next,
find us a different time to live in.

Academia a retreat and something to escape from.
Bastions of “why do I have to be sitting up,”
but this is something I’ve chosen, and so I will.
We are not birds. But they are:

“Colonists like the other birds.”

Pre-internet web written about in the internet age.
Breaking up the monotony with an intonation of song.
The fairytale as an intermission.

My age is a badge, so stop badgering.
Something highly irritating described
as “nice ambient music.”

The End intercedes on our behalf,
and we can finally relax.
The natural world presents itself as if it’s ours
but somehow we find nothing is ours.

Rumination just means you haven’t written it down.

We don’t consult oracles for accuracy,
but to be engaged with the self
and universe-interrogation.

Repeat what you want to believe
and not that that makes it come true.

“h e m o r r h a g e s i n t o t h e G u l f”

Materials as territory.
Make a vow.
The building beside that territory.

The blurred-out word merely a preposition.
In an older age when the new was newer.
Sustained unresolvability.

Yes underpants

Yes underpants

Yes underpants

*

“Clad in Dimity”

Things that didn’t go nearly so wrong back then.
Dial-up’s lamentation of time.
Imagination seeing the self, metaphor of the imagination,
using Carthage as its object.

The way Michael Cross corresponded with Scalapino for so
long that she corrected his misreadings of her, but I’ll never
know my misreadings of Marthe.

“The possibility that a trick was involved.”

Memories that themselves are in the past tense.
Underdog into the wolf.
The difference between “in” and “to”
changes the entire meaning of the previous verb.

reflection/crystal/dew/drop

The object of the metaphor
and the object that is the metaphor.

Imagination unbelieving, staring in the mirror
at what it is and what it is not.
It’s not nothing.

“empathy only gets us so far”

It is at this point that some sort of angry cuss fit
seeps out onto the page, finally.

A boundary between
here and
civility beyond
the boundary
and so we assume possibility
and choices
that we cannot quite see.

“See how it comes undone”: it being the house, survival,
our days. Saved by a moment of sunlight,
or that cloud, or dogs. Gloriously/gloomily curtaining down,
living by wits/not
staying in bed.

“Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s cursed town.”

“The Sky is Falling”
“The Walls Do Not Fall”
“All Gabled Roofs Will Fail”
These are just titles of things.

Wits tell you everything unbalanced is hanging in balance.
A list of reasons that are not the reasons why I love you.