TWO POEMS BY LAURA CARTER


          Speaking of the Inner Boulevards


          Speaking of the inner boulevards

                                                                     arcades open out on them
          I have never been to Paris
                                                        but I have lived in the industrial arcades
          If the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, then I have

          been a resident of that city, which
                                                                       is a fine imitation gem of which
          I made many fine panoramas and desires
          City of reunion, city of a
          glass eye watching the buying and selling of fine
                                                                                               gloves, city of the lithographic umbrella, city of
          the great nave, I lived in the city of some commodified, some

          commodity capital, home of the pearl king,
          at the end of the ancien régime, I lived in galleries,
          I was a sharply defined genre, a

          speculating sylph, I woke up on a train, I
          was restored, there were two parallel lanes across which I could not stretch my legs,

          I was a great lover of books. I drank beer as early as

          noon. Please do not look for the card with my name on the door

          for there is no single space, the glance was a cruel one, mezzanine
          taken in like the hem of a skirt



          The Name of Our Country, Circa 1980


          Was it England? Was it France? Was it Hollywood?
          I distinctly remember
          a poem about a deer with white roses in its mouth,
          and the deer’s body glistened when they pushed it
          in the river, and the river glistened
          when it spoke, and the world’s body was
          there, and language was not the organon of thought,
          and the blonde with the gleaming
          ibises was sleeping on an opposite coast
          in the nave of the empirical,
          and I was four years old. I released
          my own ibises, the birds of speech, into wind, as a child does when pressed
          for answers, when reading big books.
          Maybe our country had more than one name,
          scrawled in the Book of Signatures,
          my own small and frail beside the skimmed notes
          and dictionaries. It was autumn,
          a birthday party on a screened porch,
          Walter Mondale on TV,
          the thought of a country new.


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Laura Carter lives in Atlanta, Georgia.


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