Poems
New Intelligence5
1
Stars
are the campfires
of exiles.
Language exists
to pull things
close.
*
Stop that!
Communications
are being monitored.
Collusion is forbidden.
Humanity
will be punished
with the profusion
of new jargons.
2
Inverted in a glass,
a white cup
invents the underworld.
*
Fog thins
to chiffon,
nylon,
Easter.
*
In the universe next door,
I’m gone
and the shadows
of the leaves
of the elm I had pulled down
still make a fuss
over the earth.
(From Just Saying, Wesleyan University Press, 2013, pages 91-92).
5Armantrout is a good reader of scientific literature and this is shown in numerous poems, like this one. Science is, for her, another way to deal with language and metaphysics.
