Poetry
Minor Treatise on A Warning from Robbe-Grillet
Stunned bird rewakes in the cold
pan. Fluttering heart
placed there by hand, hand screened
in a plaid dishtowel—
When windows face each
other the thousand grassblades
quarantined in separate yards merge—
you like the phrase mise-en-abîme
—and the pan is named "Bake-King," innards
greased with old burnt oils. The bird’s
error is transparency, okay. But could this resolve
the stove’s erotic corners, enamel
curves harmed— how— as if by hammer-blows,
black metal shown through, bone
reversed. Temporarily broken-necked, small
duped-by-vision imperceptibly
revives. "Electric" is a slowly reddening
spiral, "gas" the sudden blue mandala/tit flaring
in the mother’s mother’s mother’s muttering
dark. You set it free by the dead stump, it hops,
hooray. Dumb energy recollects itself
into itself but if you begin
by believing in metaphor you will end
by believing in God
Contributor
Frances RichardFrances Richard is nonfiction editor of the literary journal Fence; a member of the editorial team at the art and culture magazine Cabinet; and a frequent contributor to Artforum. Her first book of poems, See Through, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2003. She teaches at Barnard College, and lives in Brooklyn.
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