“one way / to placate matter” (Rae Armantrout)

There comes a moment in a poem by Rae Armantrout – usually early on – where a fault in the earth shifts, and one foot is suddenly in a different time zone. Should you reset your watch? Or just allow the doubleness to creep into your consciousness until you recognize, with a start, that your consciousness is already doubled, itself part of a shifting attention observing the shifting world?

Here are two poems by Armantrout, both from Made to Seem (1995).