Drafts 1–38, Toll

Draft 5: Gap

Draft $: Gap i. A man within aday ofdead estranged in light, that flat flash struck, half-holds his present eyes whitened behind glass Right on the edge. lets a child rip it open enamel a "modern" kind of minimal mural: indelible black rectangles; who coded the deletions, giving special numbers, offering a sheet of explanations to translate "I guessI'll never seeyou again" I had almost said why the deletions had occurred, but I meant "I guess I won't see it was careful and exactingwork "little child self" folds child soi(e) pink silk, tan silk strokedelectricity. many entirely black pages many black squares framed by grids of half-chucked writing 28 Strange photyograph you for a while" —dried— make golden "needles" engaged. but I had spoken the truth some pages you can't tell anything hoarded, that aborted opening, one peers at those blackened. an electriccurrent trying to read what cannot be read not to touch especially with the "wet hands of tears." "have been left out of" 2. Black megaliths of memory Are they too empty or too impacted, protected Deciphering "they evoke for me BODY"a dark shimmer within a square "activity of repressing that might be refabricating of making and losing" if this is memory a rocking I havean excellentmemory. of light is it light? is it leaves? leaven? a place? a dissolution opens a scattering of the lighter shadows of shadow but if it means actually remembering. . . within darkness the darker wall... Every mark to touch a nerve in a backwash of silence a cicadian roaring "it isproper to go back of silence: covers and articulates 29 had been created by the bugs crying to each other a close packed sound, their impastos of fluctuating distance. The poem's poem a secret voice muttering porous you to the shadows" Black pages of gigantic books, tarred glutinous with erasure asif asphalt food were spread on burlap bread. sprawled and fragrant in a webbingof the gaps woven disclosure... Low late pre-dawn freight moans, or seems to "J-w" as it rushes the grade crossing its track shining ahead and away into unfillable space. Something read that cannot be deciphered. I said I had spoken the On which plot half wrapped in a sweaty sheet a sheer drop: one small point, one of the smallest, if points had sizes, yet such, that still can barely imagine its densities andextensives 30 if all could be factored and scattered over the breadth that is and that it is. 3Someone said this form: one, start two, "the scattering" three, a "rush to finish" but whereisit? even metal linkknot 's unfathomable ecliptic swerving stars— Call that point "R" on some scroll of unrolling: the there— that I "was once there" all right under a black square cannot be read or found and in what language of uneasy rapture. Grass stars, tree stars, dog stars misty labyrinth 3i sores, spots, pocks, fats, jolts teeming constellations, and fecund milky spore of galaxies on darkling sky or pinked by the city which dims the stars by local plethoras of light: There, with little swinging words knots bits bugs bite or shine little guttering words ... August-September 1988 32 ...