Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988) by Betty Goodwin (by Anne Carson)
Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988) by Betty Goodwin (by Anne Carson)
Original Text
Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001).
This poem
is reproduced on the Griffin Prize Web Site (from the winning volume on the 2001 Canadian Shortlist).
1If body is always deep but deepest at its surface.
2If conditionals are of two kinds factual and contrafactual.
3If you’re pushing, pushing and then it begins to pull you.
4If police in that city burnt off people’s hands with a blowtorch.
5If quite darkly colored or reddish (bodies) swim there.
6If afterwards she would sit the way a very old person sits, with no pants on, confused.
7If you reach in, if you burrow, if you risk wiping in.
8If a point that has been fed over years becomes a little bit alive.
9If the seated figure started out with an idea of interrogation.
10If there was a quality of very strong electrical light.
11If you had the idea of interrogation.
12If interrogation is a desire to get information which is not given or not given freely.
13If buried all but traceless in the dark in its energy sitting, drifting within your own is another body.
14If at first it sounded like rain.
15If your defense is perfect after all it was the trees that walked away.
16If objects are not solid.
17If objects are much too solid.
18If there are no faces, if faces are not what you interrogate.
19If red makes you think of chance or what chance operates with.
20If the feet cross in a way that sucks itself under, sucks analogies (Christ) under.
21If as Artaud says anyone who does not smell cooked bomb and condensed vertigo is not worthy of being alive.
22If you choose what to undo, if you know how you make that choice.
23If you lead her to water.
24If you bring her a gift say one of Pascal’s thoughts.
25If you bring “infinite fractions of solitude” (Nabokov).
26If you bring a bit of Artaud like “all writing is shit all writers are pigs.”
27If conditionals are of two kinds possible and impossible.
28If she slides off, if you do.
29If red is the color of cliché.
30If red is the best color.
31If red is the color of art pain.
32If Artaud is a cliché.
33If artists tell you art is before thought.
34If you want to know things like where that leg is exactly.
35If the horses were exhausted.
36If she begged, if she came to the table, if the sequence doesn’t matter.
37If it begins, a trickle, this think slow falling of the mind.
38If you want to know why the sliding affects your nerves.
39If you want to know why you cannot reach your own beautiful ideas.
40If you reach instead the edge of the thinkable, which leaks.
41If you stop the leaks with conditionals.
42If conditionals are of two kinds real and unreal.
43If nothing sticks.
44If she waits alongside her.
45If Miroslav warned us that experimental animals should not be too intelligent.
46If to care for her is night.
47If an enigma came into the room.
48If all the other enigmata fought to get out.
49If outside of here the light has gone from the tops of the trees that rise over a brick wall opposite.
50If conditionals are of two kinds now it is night and all cats are black.
51If how many were killed by David exceeds how many were killed by Saul by tens of thousands.
52If they don’t feel pain the way we do.
53If you drove here with toys in the backseat.
54If you wrote a word on the floor of the cell in waterdrops and videotaped it drying.
55If Vitruvius says no temple can be coherently constructed unless it is put together exactly as a human body is.
56If red is the color of italics.
57If italics are a lure of thought.
58If Freud says the relation between a gaze and what one wishes to see involves allure.
59If you cannot remember what word you wrote.
60If art is the servant of allure.
61If Vitruvius does not talk about taking temples apart but we may assume the same canon applies.
62If there is no master of allure.
63If conditionals are of two kinds allure and awake.
64If no matter how you balance on the one you cannot see the other, cannot tap the sleep spine, cannot read what that word was.
65If “contrafactual” applied to conditionals means the protasis is false.
66If (for example) “had you not destroyed the barometer it would have forewarned us” implies that we are now standing in a storm of rain.
67If as a matter of fact it is a clear night I would say almost relentlessly clear.
68If conditional comes between condiment and condolence.
69If you do not want to remember what word it was.
70If your life bewilders you (sly life).
71If the rain lashes your face like manes of all the horses of this century.
72If conditionals are of two kinds graven and where is a place I can write this.
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2011