Louis Armand's books Inexorable Weather (Arc) and The Garden (Salt) were released last year.





Alembic

nor does anything perish except that which can be transformed into
something else
                    - george oppen


nine days without names, drawing breath
difficultly - so much water
under the bridge, counting the passengers, stow-
aways (“i call the thin planks, the light
wood & remember
to shore” as if their dependence
were upon each other) - the resin-coloured
filaments of streetlights on the graben: it has
its lost names & its distant
re-namings, per accidens - even as the lines themselves
“resist interpretation,” a problem of
purpose, syntax: the carriages &
sidings at masaryk station - which is to say
a derelict cadence - intermittently, as here
the menacing red eye
of an observatory winks down - would it be so objectionable, then
to answer it? just because it is
subjective, in a sky
that moves & remains in the shadow
of a doubt-translating a night
                                    too large for resourcefulness







Against a Field Sinister

another night of the grey unrelenting straight lines
                                                                - francis webb


it did not appear entirely, i was conscious only of a shadow
& then ... beyond the dusk that is no longer an enlargement -
a room with teeth set on edge, in the presence of “vacant
metaphors” (what they appear to enclose, like
strange mouths: she thinks about them constantly, surrounded
by their solicitous attention, the activity of their incisors, their
tongues & spittle) - she finished eating she lit
a cigarette, on the closed terrace: at all times the air itself felt
solid, objective - “but if i let the walls go
is it because you wrote them all down?” a vertical pantomime
in which the eye is still a ratio of apprehension (little
by little approaching the event of something
that is not going to happen) - light projected at different
angles, the sun “rising” over the harbour; the harbour like a
smooth-shaven pubis (did she notice that the doors &
windows had been open?) - out of identical compartments the
bodies emerge but do not complete one an-
other - nakedness … in open, accumulated surfaces -
everything is still floating, this floor in the syllables at the moment
they are all there, swimming in polished linoleum ...
“art,” she said, “is the imitation of nature in her manner of
operations” - at least it had this semblance: the sky, too,
looks like a stain - left to be rectified, or we wash our hands of it