Drafts 1–38, Toll

Draft 11: Schwa

Draft 11: Schwa The "unsaid" is a shifting boundary resisting evenitself. Something, the half-sayable, goes speechless. Or it can't and Inbetween what is, and that itis, is9 Inside an offhand sound, a howe or swallowed shallow. Sayable Sign oftheun-. Not the exotic that is strange but this strangepuzzle coil cup "here" where time goes forward floats by boundaries a memory of half sayable vague, and textured what and that it is rose or knit or mother-of-pearl goes speechless marks the child makes letters, a signaturegraffiti, film stills, saffron light on a west soffit, Inside. 75 Andlnbetween lost objects, a tiny doll and her SWEE-TOUCH-NEE tin tea trunk of frills. There was a set of girl hankies, saying Monday, Tuesday, it the glimmers over 7new days. Wednesday, veiled, those patches of old ice swampy around tree roots, low, soupy grey now so that a great mist covers what was dirty embankments, clouds glowering in the nooks of soft valleys as I rode or ride so awayI do not recognize the vacuum walls of dreams A Thursday, some small good girl speechless twirls her plaid umbrella, Friday, the details. Struggle tableau: squeezer-siphons suction out the mucousy sinuses. Framed from the outside, theflailing careens thru schwa time a darter from the murk of silence. Are lost. Most. Things of which. 76 Old familiars, hook toes in amber. "as still aware as" Bits matching or unmatched "gurnish helfin." Can't helf or heft can't scarcely help the looming empty weight of emptied time. Carry an eviscerated bird. The rubber chicken of a melted past. Whose kosher yellowfeet cut off stuff up the vacantcavity. Lunchbox thermos shatters sliveringinto All little tiny "it's" and "its"; therewas a shiftingboundary that is strange Open the drawer speechless Of all the lost things never reseen hardly bearable never recoverable, here is something! An orange blotter! on which brighten cough syrup bottle- and bird- profiles edged with a tiny ruler. WAMPOLE'S CREO-TERPIN compound, Conjunctures detailed and lavish, Mott Avenue, Far Rockaway, some of the ten birds (nested, pecking, chirping, or in flight) became, in the four decades interim, endangered. Other conjunctures blank. Years this incredible life in time "simply" erased. yet day by day the bits andcrumbs wiped up by what invisible vectors lost not lost;half lost, and lost. A random swirlingpulse of bronzed leaves breath of a wind intense and subsiding, so 77 somefalling here, some over there like Betelgeuseand Rigel, 200million, where the light lands whose faded thread chance calls the pulse more powerful more bright its factors more unfathomable than any thing weknow. And weknow nothing. Yet the blue twistedinner tinkle of milk poured out the broken thermos in which mirror-like glass bits splintered YET WHAT? Is this rubble accountable? Half-memories, memories half empty, schwas of memory, Things, half Things, Things' effacement. Shadow somber lesions slopped and filled by creamy prime, so that almost, they are drawn back to the stretched silence ofcanvas. Made in China, marked down sweater now marked down half again to reallycheap: that I, whatever that is, can, without particular investment in it, stand in the mall, drawn and quartered like a heifer trying this thing in which filiations 78 (geopolitical, material, and narrative) thread, and are stored. Signs readable, but also embarrassing. "It's so now."Just a Knitting whoserich patterns shuttled thru dark labyrinths "punch up your Look." How manymiles have its bumpy acrylicstravelled to havecome thusfar, to SpringfieldMall, adrift from its pence-paid maker The weaveof its wefters, its shunters, its buyers, itsfilmyyarns' dictation and direction Who can must Credit. And the bright tags and the price codes are tacked in plastic string, and anchor it a sound halfway between articulation and disappearance a sound falling out or beginning to fall out, voiced, but seeminglyvoiceless. Unheard vocalics taken for granted are making, are mocking up words, that no one can put their finger on,yes abrim with scrambled schwas and unfathomable glissades. Just as a febrile distracted 79 ichneumon bug, the leggy one, wavers shadowy from corner to corner, fliespanicked, and climbs treadmills ofwall, this loss seems irrevocable. I quiver in mypinhole time where bits of voice are buried in broken, unrecoverable objects, the flowered butter dish, a-smash Tripfilmstorn from a stolen camera, and dumped, bits and turns, the buried sounds...