The To Sound, Eric Baus (2004)
The sisters of the broken candle
““spilled sand and lamplight” has been my sister for a while now.”
“Every rattled out lightbulb means a brother’s pillow is burning.”
They wanted me to hold the bird calmly (for title)
I was thinking birds with extremely long necks (entire poem)
“and my sister sees / a voice / I was using words I didn’t know / my mouth uses rain to say / she nods and we know / the body is a sequence”
Untitled, pg. 19 (entire poem)
“my sister was thinking / placing flames / I was a scatter of birds / next to each other”
“she was looking for some handwriting / to pull across her lips”
“I was using the gape / in my sister’s mouth // seeing the word sun”
Dear Birds, I’m running out of numbers.
“We are all so far from home.”
“watching carp lunge onto rocks, like being able to walk made us the solution for water.”
Dearest Sister, Thanks for leaving me space to sign my full name in your absence.
“I sent you postcards from every skylit exit. Did you get the one when I thought the word sun in my mouth would keep us both warm? We both know glare is not enough border: bending light is a form of precision.”
“I can treat all this traffic like a single evening voice.”
While the somnambulist explains the proper way to carve the eyes from a pigeon,
“He thinks about the three minutes he stopped breathing in saltwater. Closing his lids at fish. Wondering why his shirt felt like skin.”
“He speaks softly with empty sleeves. Says a bird losing altitude is a new kind of rain. Roughly equivalent to the fluid in my ears.”
Dear Birds, You can say I contact whoever is in the memorized room,
““the shade my mouth bent open” or “handfuls of sugar untouched in an abdomen.” I was fully articulated when you said this voice is changing, find me a new skin like my index was sound, like my blankest card said “surface worker.””
Dear Sister, If all stars are syllogisms,
“tell me what to say before I know what I’ve seen. You say we hum to make our names translucent, to keep the constellations moving. Call me “a bell to warn the birds” when a drift of one eye means enough letters for flight.”
Wondering why her shoes felt like skin
“she asked what animal left lines under her eyes.”
“We watched the scar on the palm of her left hand. The way / bleeding thumbs breed during sleep.”
Dearest Sister, Sugar is suffering somewhere in water.
“I’m thinking through a skin of wet cloth.”
“you’ve been my sister / for a while now”
“she was / a winter’s worth of hum in / my ghost / birdbones / born / a lungful of cinders”
Dearest Sister, What is the difference between “an instrument of revision”
“laughing in the water lungs”
“as if wind were a form of eating”
Dearest Sister, Let’s not pretend there are no bad questions. (entire poem)
“Just because you’re halfway through the night doesn’t mean the world has to split down the center. When you showed me how to hold an umbrella upside down, gathering light, there wasn’t time to draw a new map, to talk me through another set of teeth. We’ve covered this ground before, the place between opacity and oracle in my library mouth. If I’m playing to the angles of an empty house, give me some feedback from your fleshed out shadows.”
If a sleeper moves into her own snow (for title also)
“name an ache in her covers”
When the somnambulist went back to sleep
“he did so with an incomplete knowledge of the incendiary vocabulary of snails.”
“The pain in my sheets won’t go away.”
Sorry for my absence of lines, my breath has tightened over two hours becoming helical enough to infest the exact scent of your spine.
“I am writing to you from the most public library in the world.”
The word moon got tetanus.
“She asked the difference between growing a beard and not shaving. I chose the latter and grass grew around my ankles. We spoke like matches in mirrors.”
“The line between astronomy and cutting the grass grew thicker every time we tried to remove it.”
I am building a body out of paper, splay, and splice.
“You could shape my mouth to believe in the body”
There appears to be diagnostic friction in your amblyopia, your patched off flight.
“Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Anybody Speaking Words” (1982, acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas, 96 by 61.5 inches) is perhaps the best glottal stop for your repealed gloss, your nitrogen highness.”
Wondering why her skin feels like sand
“Flushed like a goose stumbled into flight. Flecked with buckshot.”
“Suddenly her water becomes unfair. Breaks simply in the bodies around him.”
Thanks for grasping the pigeons I sutured to your lining.
“I was trying to pronounce our science quieter than skin.”
“Everything I say is part sound rain. Half flayed iris. A flutter or umbra in the house of wound beginning.”
“I use the word signal. You would sound so good beside my name. It is pictorial."
“You have strayed in my mouth for so long.”
At first you were miniature,
“The sun has been practicing those tiny flames all night.”
Dearest Sister, My most buried wires tell me we are thinking of the same fish.
“I could hear your oldest rain hitting the ground.”
Dear Birds, When you saw etymology as a swelling epicenter,
“my mouth cloaked in mumbling? You said hearing me talk was loaning flour to sugar.”
The somnambulist says the oldest swallow in his throat has finally gone aqua, (for title also)
“The say the quietest gesture is falling from a mouth.”
The to sound (entire poem)
“You are the one after end. The burned bird I woke up in.”