Drafts 1–38, Toll

Draft 26: M-m-ry

Draft 26: M—m—ry That the airy opening hung somber,/ that the moon trapezoid/ on the floor be thus, be/ here, that musical/ logic in the hypnogogic space/ come wavesrush/ crosswise, athwart they suspend opaque/ particles, sand versus translucence,/ and that this filled/void, this exfoliated down fold, volatile,/ asks for "rachel back,"/ in subjunctive sentences/ within the earth's inward narrow crooked lanes/ and startles who, or what, that with me/ tripped the limen and wascaught/ Here, maze of a maze, the/ she and I, the I/ of she "back from where"/ were dazed amid the real/ world, the real real world/ inside which this "guaranteed destruction/ of papers and files" exists; happens as such/ the service advertised that this company provides. We have reviewed! the document—a one-Page Memor-l andum—Plastic ribbons blown/ blowing on the twisted/ twigs of 1995 be any tree/ by any roadway, everyday,/ the wish will flood/ such shredded flags of loss/ and have determined the variable/ space, feather, point, gleam, spume,/ midge streaks readable or not. More than that?/ that it cannotbe declassified/ dim dawn-long day, twi-grey/mostly Ijust marvel/ at mild blue watercolor/ light a struggle/ between voices that compete/ to identify what I want/ and other voices/ whose high twists cannot be/ remembered 166 or released in segregableportions.I It must bewithheld that spoke/ of a hand erasing/ across the mind collective/ hope in the photograph/ she did not look like herself/ she said/ tho she did she'd half forgotten/ what we did, we did all that/ two decades whited out/ static "that short/ of a time." inits entirety/ on the basis of the (b) (1) and (b) (3) exemptions of the FOIA. It's just time/ a soft unreadable light sweet/ wax in wane./ Poetry the opposite:/ it's always given out/ the fact that it remembers forever,/ good at deigning memorial design:/ this pile-up of letters— don't do me/ anyfavors, since, as the site/ of detritus and forgetting,/ one could not want to seeit bettered. An explanationof these exemptions! is enclosed. Raise and lower the frames/ to lock jacquard./ Aubergine robes,filmed herself thus clad,/ ghosts of the homeless/ at the windshield. Lives/ in furrowsunspellable/ mnemosyne misty over the field (misspelled/ asfiled),its empty/ dashes declare a signing gap, singing/ gap of herself hello again unpronounceable/ mnemosyne: blanking out in extreme/ sadness, bartering/ liquidity to hyphenate the cracks/ because they mark/ a bridge to particulars one wants "forever."/ Marjoram the tiny. Hyssop the twirly.Basil/ the tangy in time stuttering mn-mn-mn-/ cold morse/ dash dash and sputtered out, the gutteringflares/ gone ash. This is a velocity of signs. /57 Small yards and all that infrastructure lyingbare, beating still. Train bridge, boulevard razor wire, resignation wholesale. The many moons of Jupiter and other parts in a kit, the universe soft in our hearts, who go the road of the unsayable under phosphorescence, the stars and planets made little enough for us. Here. On her cake the "e" in "years" got smudged. Two full dreams to catch the train just left. Could barely decipher the veering of half-spoken, stubs of the uncanny outcropped along the track, dead and livingyoked together that harrow shattered shadows and dim light, their immeasurable desires indignant for name. Take it all as a loss. Begin anywhere. August-October 1995 168 ...