Notes Preceding Trust

by Kathleen Fraser

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

After graduating in English Literature, 1959, from Occidental College (California), Kathleen Fraser went to NYC to work as an editorial associate for Mademoiselle magazine, pursuing her poetic studies with Stanly Kunitz at The 92nd St. Y "Poetry Center" and, briefly, with Robert Lowell and Kenneth Koch at The New School. At this time, she began to meet a number of New York poets associated with Black Mountain, The Objectivists and the New York School. Among these poets, those to have most important influence on her work were Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest and George Oppen. She later counted the works of Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson and Basil Bunting as having a serious impact on her poetics. In 1964 she won the Frank O'Hara Poetry Prize and the American Academy's "Discovery Award". Other writing fellowships have included two NEA Poetry grants, in 1971 and 1978, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry in 1981.

After seven years as a journalist - writing and editing - and the publication of her first book - Change of Address [Kayak, 1968] - , Fraser was invited to teach as a poet-in-residence for two years at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where her university teaching career began. She taught, subsequently, in contemporary literature and writing programs at Reed College and at San Francisco State University where she remained as a Professor of Creative Writing through 1992. In her early years at SFSU, Fraser directed The Poetry Center and founded the American Poetry Archives.

From 1983-1991, Fraser published and edited HOW(ever), a journal focused on innovative writing by contemporary women and "erased" or neglected texts by Anglo/American modernist women writers, together with associate editors Frances Jaffer, Beverly Dahlen and Susan Gevirtz and contributing editors Carolyn Burke and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Fraser has just completed a manuscript of essays - Translating the Unspeakable - on those American poets and poetics having a particular impact on her own writing and thinking.

She has published twelve volumes of poems and two children's books, including What I Want (1974), Magritte Series (1977), New Shoes (1978), Each Next, narratives (1980), Something (even human voices) in the foreground, a lake (1984), Notes Preceding Trust (1987) , When New Time Folds Up (1993) and WING (1995). Her most recent collection, - il cuore : the heart - New & Selected Poems ( 1970-1995), was published by Wesleyan University Press in the Fall of 1997. Fraser splits her time between San Francisco and Rome where she lives with her husband, the philosopher/playwright Arthur Bierman, from March through June . She has lectured and given readings at a number of Italian universities and has translated Lampi e acqua, a book-length serial poem by Maria Obino (excerpts published in AVEC), and a selection of poems by Toni Maraini, Daniela Attanasi, Sara Zanghi and Giovanna Sandri (published in Thirteenth Moon, "Italian Women Writers" issue).

Reviews

[Fernando Fernández · Rating 3 out of 5]

another great title, the poems are sometimes very powerful, opening new paths of what can be done (shifts to/from abstract - concrete) but some letters and prose excertps stuck with the rest tired me a tad, maybe because I read it after Something, better finished... it didn't come so much as a source of continuous enjoyment. Anyways, all in all a good book. That's something

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The seizing of the blue social level, the red duality inert the yellow body forming intimate contact, essential string, the beige of hemp and wall, green responding, green sado/shadow bottle, the plum enables us, the black beyond our hours will satisfy this encounter,

substantial white of chair the presence in the world of non-primary blue. Red enables us to be distinct and substantial, at some point we must inhabit ourselves, the evidence is mauve and lively with grey borders, to know, to feel, even be the inheriting white, the celery, that light with which we regulate, become pink and peach, we blush and are fruit, we bruise but did blossom formally, we are halfway there, we are capable of giving the ultra aquamarine, we are absence of carnelian. Now

you are in the violet world and she is turqoise and you want to tangle in each other's altro. Inside the border, the heightened concern between her and a colour she feels is appropriate in this hour. The superiority of ivory sheets, the infinity of a door only slightly ajar, the accommodation of ivory as you sleep, or the letting go. His father on the floor but younger now, jar of petals rose, his rosy muscles far, something bleached, these overtones, moving from ourselves, from you, your future other, letting blues contain us, or

the white besieged by red, not left alone enough, thus sterilized, not enough in grey memory, elephant ivory, the year of grey shadow, the large shape behind it, the year of breaking thread around the boudayr, the primary of embroidered meanings, petal of each pool and mouth, poppies opening in spite of every border or the yellow diminishing. Purple more or less
[...]

- boundayr, pg. 9

* * *

Claim through and through,
breathe me now window.

Lift. Oh turn your back.
Turn will do

where no words fall
in the clearing we make. What

light still flickers out
of history glamorous?

Gibberish, self-pity
slams books to the floor with

curses. In several dresses
the dark weeds repeat

their occupancy. Enemy
season alerts these

skeletons. Listening mind,
mine. Rosy genitals

regret your hiding manifold,
those fine-creased boundaries,

longing muscles,
my spoon, your face

between away
and a clearing. You were

this place made of nothing,
sniffing around. Four legs,

meadow animal, trees
called into hearing.

- Claim, pg. 11-12

* * *

We are after difficulty
Our love is effulgent and the world
at each edge surrounds

creeping at the peripherals
We are a zone we can have
and take each morning

first in the different light
What inhabits
the full air

of who spoke in the interim
There are shifts we learn
to trust behind their split seconds

The planet has rolling
shaped and blue dominates
not even looking up. Green swells

under snow. We know this
We repeat the shapes
to ourselves. Your mouth

for an instant melting
as receding weather
in a body. Someone else's

distance
determining a thickness

not between us

*

The habit of viewing each
beloved
holding more honey
did cut her wingtips
flying ever toward him
Still he is safe
Standing up
to give things time to find
greater safety

*

(clearly uneasy
fixed upon himself as he is
but lives
still caught in long range)

*

fox red fox sex
huge parasols'
tropic flourish;

embattlements, beloved

your heart lick salt
insinuation

*

fuschia with milky light
petal light lemon gold

wrapped in wet paper
in jars something fluttery

your eye sings
both thinking

of slight explosions
we knew on encountering

these formal drenchings
cut the same each July

with peculiar stems
so definitely
long and bare of leaf
coreopsis

or ferny cosmos lavish
as fog

*

"I feel much better than I did, I feel how I
flower under the silver-plated ice-strainer."

*

Racing to erase footprint
pressure, the movie
alerted us
to expect a telephone ringing
in both our air
When we walked away
many had been weeping

*

The daughter's pregnancy, the empty chair
and now the warning from school

*

All has changed and once again
math a lurking problem, Vermeer, the snow

a very fast lane of traffic
the intentional chance taken when, without looking,

I swerved our conversation's reserve with similar behaviour

*

Doing (sitting-up) in this, if he really loves her
Until-he-gives-her-up view of him

Yet I do enjoy it, still sleeping and waking fitfully

*

flaunted in the interim
anything as drastic

- notes preceding trust, pg. 13-16

* * *

Upon us white.
Open white and fall

and finally break
through late November

and strain where snow
did gather its weight

to childhood and the body.
Shifts accelerate

from a loud street,
tires where leaves rub

little at ourselves.
A day inside, gazing long

from the sea. We name it
blanket or dark.

- Losing People, pg. 17

* * *

The governess is in white. Helen lags with a letter from Karl M. When Jenny arrives at the scene of the seduction, a voice is overheard saying: "I am not interested."

Don't intervene at the beginning of the spectacle, but interrupt and conclude the prologue (spoken, not sung, by Helen D, in the following passage: "This is pure talk. Karl's adornments are always placed in his easy chair.")

Karl has ordered his rice, by now, cooked in ink of squid. "Grainy, as with soot," he explains, "yet not hooked-up to the old life." He assigns a working-class gesture to one hand on each of their bodies.

Henny's words are gaps. Olive. Oil. Spreads. Further. Makes. An. Enlarged. Spot. In. Several. Places. And "you pay for your choices." (This, in her mother tongue.) She wants to write in English, with some slighted resistance to her situation. Karl asks questions wherever he goes and studies every day, moving from cookbooks to soccer, choosing science texts always in the preferred language of the country currently inhabited.

Jenny returns to her conjugations. She sings them like scales:

Do : I
Re : you (singular)
Mi : she
Fa : he
Sol: we
La : you (plural)
Ti : they
Do : I

. . . as if in a fever, but with perfect lucidity.

Steps cross the floor above their heads, repeatedly and
without a rug to muffle them.

- Written in the margins, pg. 20

* * *

I do not trust these glaring invitations to break into green. An apple, viewed as a journey: have a bite, another bite. A red and yellow street, all dashes and splashing. Or white teeth moving in, just under the skin. First comes the comma, then the period. Walking on water, then stepping into a long breath trying to catch up. I am having trouble finding where to take the first step. In my dream there was a dish of white buttons on the stove, uniform and slippery bu big enough to be sewn on pajamas. This was noticed after I went blind. I was asleep but looking down, nevertheless. I saw my legs tucked beside me on the bed and could not move them, even though their doubles were swinging up and out over the edge to the floor. Some undeciphered part of my was on its own. The body I left behind on the bed had come to a standstill, densely heavy and a stranger.
"You've got to try to understand what it's like," I explained to a man I'd once lived with, who walked into my house as if emerging from a bank of fog. "I can't see you. There is only light and the dark shapes of things. Because I hear your voice, I know it is you, but I am blind." I was saying: I'm not who you expect. There is nothing to eat but a small dish of buttons.
Some minutes later I awoke. I could now think of moving my legs and feel their movement at the same instant. Since then, I have been running in place.
A person I desire walks into the room and set a place of oyster-coloured paté at my feet. There has been talk of Tangiers all morning and a boat I might help steer down the Loire. I am running in place on the road that leads to the gate called "Everything you ever wanted." The person puts a key in my wine glass. I choose to lift the glass and drink every drop. The silence grows jittery and shifts its weight. I have come to the end of the list of necessary distractions. Each task has a check mark next to it, a little gesture on the map's white silence.

- Everything you ever wanted, pg. 22

* * *

Cielo magnifico!
"Az-zu-ro"
"Ce-les-te"
Always cypress floating the dead outside SIcilian towns
(thin blue fabric where her knees press through).

Hair of old railway posters, yellow
helmet, some sort of
gold bracelet
above the elbow one notices
as her left hand appears to make a social gesture.

All is upholstery
extending in fuzzy grey marbleized curves
over banquettes and moving walls;

your companion wears the black watchstrap and leans forward and
is pulling at her pearls
with a sentiment you imagine.

This is a story where the lake is expensive watercolour paper
erased in the middle to a worn-through impurity.
You are rowing and it does or doesn't matter.

A life is out the window and you are pulled through it.
All you worry about diminishes you. At every moment
a body is being violated,
although the mahogany window frame was designed for safety
when you chose this method of seeing.
[...]

- Electric railway, 1922, two women, for Susan Gevirtz, pg. 25

* * *

To write it (you and I)
this plan
something like a dress you didn't choose

or tore our of newsprint
imagining a day clear enough

for simple exchanges
a red wallet

flattened, geometric, leather
and formal with its deep snow

That face you love opening before you
Someone historical in puffy satin

Svelto does not mean svelte
The language crosses over and is wet

In Venice we said Venezia

In any small town the beat flew
to a middle syllable

but you were near your future
I had been drinking little wakeful gulps

only yesterday and close by
(gelato)

in the heat. Bodies standing
in pools of sound with their tongues

buried so, crushed ice around canisters

*

If

a city is an invention
why are we not there

We divide time into little containable parcels
which can fit on one page

You write in the heat
but I continue to draw

a fresh calendar for each month
I begin with clear white space

and follow with sharpened divisions
For one evening I can sleep

unarmed before the desired
eventfulness.

I remember the more than hundred
flowers in "Primavera"

or rather that Botticelli wanted

each singleness
his pleasure

cleared by restoration
to petals finally visible

through varnish the botanical detail

- Botticelli: from Bryher's imagined notes, pg. 27-28

* * *

No voices
On weekdays when you're not here

only slap of blue water
rising, claiming

In air, bee hexagons pressed into frames
(geese gawks) (Vespas squeezing)

*

In Rome, on the giant outdoor screen
in Circolo Massimo, "Reds" is smearing
rectangular lantern light & old politics

A body opens and shuts
as if the whole idea were mechanical

*

On weekends you try breathing
from other, less obvious apertures
You tie a square of white cotton firmly around your hips
in the learned way
as though this culture were modest
sunning itself in deepening measurements

*

bronze claimed
and re-claimed (she puts her arm
next to yours, then his)
A comparison gathers speed
The air divides
[...]

- Agosto, Pucini, Gabriella, for Wanda and Oliviero Testa, pg. 29

* * *

Boot, wet sand and more white along the borders defining a trail of lush chemicals we adhere to. Your mouth, the cold ocean, these flecks of splitting light I could never paint. White silver nitrate. Blue breaking spilling. Show me the long shot. We sit inside its wide lens. Where does a sea wall ever curve again, with this patience?

Concrete arcs away from you. Full scale body throws its limit of miles out, to take in the tiny but animate species we cling to. Multiples of rough wet fur. Terrier leaping in waves each time its red hair flings forward with the pitch. Dives again for the moon still daylight floats. Every object on its stretching membrane, not hurried. You touch the little spots which rise and listen and slowly grow wet.

- Boot, wet sand and more white, pg. 33

* * *

You couldn't find it in the bird's weight
pulling an arc through the twig. You must

catch yourself somewhere or fall anywhere.
Four cherries, red showing through

green webs. This surprise may not catch you
and that is the trouble. A whole new life

may be just another tree. Now the floor
is as clean as vinegar. It shines

from rubbing. Sleeping inside your little
and constant coughs, you could hear

someone helping you, finally waking.
The helper has her rags and tools.

With tenacity she hands on to the dimming
vision. You are trying to hard

to enter this world. The door is open.
What can you find in this

that is yours, wholly? A belief,
not to be divided into silken strands

in air. This childish hope. I give you up,
each day, to another. Abstract acts

of generosity, as we dream in two positions
on the bed, with the softer, lighter pillows

just under our heads, some slight elevation.
Whole sentences are subtracted from

conversation. Darkness moves continuously
behind that line where the sun presses.

To let go of shapes held in peaches,
the bruise of a thumb and forced sweetness.

You were the lightest of all
the silver-white metals.

- These labdanum hours, pg. 34-35

* * *

inside
(jittery
burned language)
the black container

*

white bowl, strawberries
perfumy from sun
two spoons two women
deferred pleasure

*

pious impious
reason could not take
precedence

*

latent content
extant context

*

"eee wah yeh
my little owlet"
not connected up
your lit-up exit
[...]

- re:searches, pg. 36

* * *

Dear Michael,
A car, sky-blue, is rolling as easily as a marble across the two middle panes of my studio window. It follows the road to Certaldo. Call the left and right sides of my window Point A and B. Point A is a tree still leafing out in the grassy green brightness of April, though May has just entered its fourth week. A small-bird-flying completes the third line of a triangle begun by the upper left corner of the window frame. I can hear a steady stream of tractor motors up in the vineyard puttering their threads and knots of sound through the gauze of nightingales, who seem to make no distinction between sunlight and moonlight. They sing their notes in separate clear quizzical trails. Point B is a house at the edge of the road to Certaldo, at the top of the hill in front of me. The house is longer than tall; its roof of brick-red tiles breaks into three sections. The blue car has traveled from Point A to Point B with the soft momentum of gravity. Now a white care takes the same path but moves out of sight, behind a patch of trees quite particular in their varying height and cut of leaf yet dominated, finally, by the shape made from their overlapping differences. Shadows are moving to the left. Boccacio was born in Certaldo. How long is the life of a bee?
[...]

- Five letters from one window, San Gimignano, May 1981, pg. 43

* * *

Black dresses make people smaller
but lights seen behind an edge make an apparent notch in it.
"Look at that moon, Evangeline."

*

In the dark of the glass jar,
bodies strapped to their wings,

*

fireflies that summer after supper,
then September came and new boy
at his desk drawing war planes. Everyone wanted
a drawing made by Bobby
and some body paid him a nickel and
copied his cockpits and wings,
trying to master the clear poise
of a new shape.

*

I do not know its name but
its grey body falls
from a wire
feet first
with talons in threes and then splayed
recovers
halfway down
the border
of blue

*

We were all part of the train.
When the train was on time,
the passengers said,
[...]

- Four voices telling stories about dark and light, pg. 51