Drafts 1–38, Toll

Draft 14: Conjunctions

Draft 14: Conjunctions "Conjunctions have made themselves live by their work." Gertrude Stein, "Poetry and Grammar" 1. To write with the formidable consciousness of loss thus: repeatedly emphasized under cross-examination: skin, sky,fog,silence , andhumility. To vow to write so that if, in some aftermath, a few shard words, chancily rendered, the potchked scrap of the human speck washed up out of the torn debris, to write so that if your shard emerged from the shard pile people would cry, and cry aloud "look!look!" //"yours were the only poem, the only fragment left, those who came after, part of a running script on the running subject "on the wholeunbounded andcontingent" it was a truly temporal predicament. "Weseem to behold only a small part of an infinitely extended structure." 2. "Unconscious in a pool of blood on the white linoleum floor." Assailed kosher products, racial intermarriage, the immigrants 92 just coming in. Bamboo writing, juxtaposition, andtypographical irregularity. Closed circuit at Market East—the flicker "Supreme Court today" the dissolve "create the corporate environment"and tonight's TV,"Number One with a Bullet." "Horror &violencedo not exceed moderate levels." You know what I'm doing. 3. Inside the small space I can hardly name small timejog around the track 6 laps, one and one-half miles— no more sheer opulence— 6 dusky runners,me and mine the miles. The way thatcan be named is not theway. But will you take a waythat has no name catch up with forgiveness? 4. Call thispoetics "posthumous." The articulation of previoussilences, the invention of memory, and,and but the hole, again I said hold, I havein my head, yeasty, a soft brown lowscumbubbling with the tide. Yet,ornor sound be alwaysthere, z/you had ears to hear, oreyes,or borrow them to burrowhere. 93 A sheet with centers of letters burnt out? black pages? blanks? scraps of tongue in combinatoire? what is "a normal book"? "Don't laugh; it's paid for." The social world, they said, "drained from his work" and didn't say "more's the pity." Snippets of dialogue? Syntax torqued? Stuff roped together on a weekday? Winking rays that scatter? Speak from the site as if you were already dead. 5. One bronze tea leaf had stuck to the side away from the milkysweet. And, nevertheless, I tip the cup; I rinse it in. "Can this watch befixed?It's very good and very old." Holds it out, gold to me, the livinglimen beyond which she lies. Shattered, babbling, she wonders z/her old watch can befixed. A deathbed. Still, I can seewhyit's in her head. 6. Hit the buzzer. Call time. No one wants mere political correctness, but "I keep trying to imagine the post-structuralist woman in a supermarket." I can imagine littleelse. The eye-door swings open for me and my cart. Blink rate, you're really on your own now! 94 7. These pinholes welive in, the little songs wesing stars; twinkling, so the restless perversities of letters can shimmer on a lenticular plastic surface. One thing looks like it's fighting or biting the other, swallowing, tumbling, pecking, and electric with pleasure, the whole poem at each other's throats. 8. But we seem to hold only a small and inchoate part spread so veiledyet, or andfecund, lavish withdaylilies. Lavender. Orange. Peach. Creamy pink and bright. Maroon, this withYellowcenter and at the core a Green eye. Ribbed, curled, cupped, stippled and even fragrant, lemony. One-day wonders in whose corolla sometimes alight spicebush swallowtail; one goddess of beauty splashing pollen, the lily her shell. Or silver streak of neon on a muggy night. It's that poetry has had brightness, such positive brightness. It was luminous, and,or rather or forgiving, light pulsing with shadows under the trees. Time is sizeless. But, likewisethen someone puts the spoon to our mouths. We moue andjuice and gum and chew. 95 Something mortal, stuffed likea brico plug into infinity. Like anyhalf-donejob withhalf-assed tools it'll neverfixit. Sooner or later the plug falls out and here coincides withnowhere. "To writeisto discover this point." 9. Dawn, line, quirk, orthography, abyss. Pretend it is all margin. The border, the letters, as the page, are white. It was all luminous and/or all destroyed. Then wewill understand neither these arrangements, the small scraps disbursed nor...