Marci Nelligan
Rauschenberg
 

This apparatus creaks and sways; you tire
of its rheumatism, its knives and altars, roasted goats.
Rather to reify our hairpins and humble letters
to new idolatry, re- and re- and re-, the fabric
folds in on itself, a winding cloth arranging
its vocation like a philosophical treatise absent

the longing to mean, absent
the black hole between its legs, the entire
question. Things do not arrange
they emanate, an allegorical goat
corny with flute music and wine, fabric
indistinguishable from skin when both are old and yellow. The letter

employs a nicotinish smell, letters
sexual in their absent
word-making, like fabric
clings to a tight, wet back. O useless tire
in the yard, sad, dead goat—
context is our everything, arranges

meetings and funerals, arranges
our narrative dissonance down to the last letter.
Doesn’t it disturb you, doesn’t it just get your goat
as though contiguity were an absent
concern, there with nostalgia, that burning tire
round the neck? In the very fabric

of our American kingdom, moth holes. The fabric
you might say, constitutes the cloth, the cloth arranges
its own discretion. Tired
old paradigm, it changes only in the letters,
its gilt embossed typography. How absent-
minded the Einsteinian concept. To think the goat

a symbol or metaphor—anything beyond a goat—
misses the point. It is simply a goat made of goaty fabric
and several hooves. Without theory, absent
thoughts go on, arranged
into glottal sounds or letters
and the music of obsession spins like tires

on a road. Tradition casts its missives in the sky, myth-white as a goat
but its letters lie, tire out like cheap synthetic fabric. In place of portraiture,
arrangement—in place of artifice, those absent aching fingers.