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Draft 17: Unnamed
- Wesleyan University Press
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Draft 1J: Unnamed It's true that everyending only erases the board rather thanfillingit. The poems are written in strange chalk strange, a chalk in some lights dark, plump with serifs on a scumbled, agitated whiteness, but mainly a whitechalk on a whiter page. Which can hardly be read and that, only under angled light. As wideas my life though when you look again it's a scroll narrow, but fast, paper towelsin the hands of a toddler, down and up hillocksand rises, blazes and falls so fast one can only trail after it, "what could be more natural." Or dark as a mist hanging over the fill-built airport smoke brown, the skylooks daubed and of no depth. But the chalk (withluck, another turn) turns translucent, light on light which is,in certain lights, likedark on dark but more blinding. Words, scattered falling arcs of shame, glaze the flicker-ridden labyrinth108 it makes a peculiar medium. And its crossgrained nourishment demands a strange tooth. Perhaps translucence is a quality of erasure. The thing anywaylooks like a CyTwombly strokes trailing each other and dibs, nibs, flicksof the wrist and a dreamy evisceration of pencil. A morning glory bolted across the door. My little valise isfilledwith souvenirs. And none of them is "art." I can seewhyhe said I wasn't interested in art. "Poetry depersonalizes 'days' in language." It sounded as if this were what I wanted yet the hole, the sufferance fell open. Heard the shaped scream of a duration. Three times: the same, the same, the same again, "nothing but these facts and all these facts." Why did he think I "wasn't interested in art"? Low song clouds in unbelonging places emphasize the activities of light, which is unspeakable. While the sound, not just the light, plays along certain vectors pools in the force field large, square, rent, timeless void. Know? Can barely know whatlabyrinth. The grass clods push up between the lines and cracks of pavement. In the depth 109 [44.200.174.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:49 GMT) of night, a street lamp looming behind them they rise and lurk, turf tufts made near twice their "real"size by shadow. But what I meant isthis. She stoodat thepit where, this50 years, 755 Jews wereshot. There, near afield of rye, she'dfound dozens of notes and addresses tossed away moments before their deaths. To this day, she regrets that, out of fear, she did not pick themup. The poetics seemsplain. Since then there are many people spend their time picking up the notes. But they are not there. They are as gone as possible to be. So the gathering is impossible. But still the shapes are bowed, and search this otherwhere of here. Yet had they actually no been there that time being remembered, it is equally possible they too would have left all of them where theylay. What illusion, what delusion, what disillusion writes these gaps? tries these missing bits and scraps? It is not elegy though elegyseems the nearest category of genre raising stars, strewing flowers.... It's not that I havenot done this, in life or whereever I needed to or throwing out the curled tough leather of the dead the cracked insteps of unwalkable shoes, but it isnot the name or term for what is meant by this inexorable bending. And it isnot "the Jews" (though of course it's the Jews), but Jews as an iterated sign of this site. Words with (to all intents and purposes) no beforeand after hanging in a void of loss the slowand normal whirlwind from which it roars they had not evermeant to be so lost, so littlewordth. / / / [44.200.174.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:49 GMT) There are plenty of reasons to wonder. Forlorn spirits with spinning "swords of flame" as much like angels as it's possible to be, but without choices or pleasure, stand empty. Wavy wheaty heads dart and sway; contradictory rages swivel them. But (pace Rilke) wecan tell these angels, or their simulacra "things." Late busses, glass smash, styrofoam containers. Low sun plain wing grey Toyota™ ormolu soccer freshener kith, soot, food, rainbows of oil. The intersection by Dunkin' Donuts, chicken buckets, milk and Gulf™ is where you have to turn coming here. So speak, stutterer, and stain the light withfigments. Rush, and brush, this evanescent shimmer that does not even track that does not even fill or replicate the historical air clotted here. 112...