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Etceteras or An Epitome of Ruins
- The University of Alabama Press
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etceteras or an epitome of ruins [44.200.249.42] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:31 GMT) And I continue rubbing as though into an emptiness, as though the pressure of the fingers pressed against nothingness. Robert Morris —Blind Time Drawings …in a little while others will find their past in you… Walt Whitman —Leaves of Grass 131 The reader always starts at an end that begins. It’s time to admit I don’t know the whole story. It gets hard to balance the negative slant. Something had to go. The toxins. The gently sloping derangements of the years. These little scraps are supposed to preserve something. My intentions? Awkward placebos. Some of them had moustaches. Puffy faces. Mushy heads. Unreliable eyes. It already went. Brown bottle in my hand. Thick purple suspenders. Denim pulled tight between. Slipping back into the shadow of an old routine. The details ran away. All kinds of feelings bump into each other. I had to learn how to empty my shelves. A betrayal in 132 fact. Just a smidgen. Simply decorated promises. I keep looking at people. Such slow movements. A complex pattern of stains in an empty theater. Dirty sneakers. Traveling hands. I smelled the smell of my childhood. The skinny staircase. Honey and vinegar. Angel food cake. Yellowed photographs under cracked glass. Peeled apples browning in a bowl by the rocking chairs. Authors on cards in a tin box. Mint fondle. No drawers. Slick warm breeze. Hand-cranked playground. A pan of melted butter. New ways to think about holes. A rent stabilized aggression. Where the living room carpet ended and the kitchen tiles began. The abrupt line disappears. 133 The view was ever shifting after panoramic windows were installed. The setting sunlight on storm clouds never reveals their sharp tragic cores. He claimed there was a subversive way of singing songs. But his references didn’t arrive from the depths. He left no room for unique objects. How easy it is to lie to everyone. Over and over. The emaciated economy of line and color. Tossing lobsters into boiling water. For sport. The shell of the person that was. Exquisite gold-tinged surfaces. More gibberish or one of the ten phrases. Joyous in another world. There was nothing at all in it for me. That is to say. The void appears even in the formulaic. 135 If you disagree, disagree in such a way that it makes a better story. The grid maintains more than regularity. My mind does not work like a computer. Why do they keep saying that? It is here where everything seems to flow that opposed ideas clash in silence. I long for eyes that can see what language does to me. Each language that disappears makes the world a narrower place. But perhaps I don’t how to recognize the one that comes to takes its place. How does a picture come from a thousand words? Who uses categories for what ends? I will be pegged again. Look, instead, for something that doesn’t exist. People find what they’re looking for. 136 Through a pair of binoculars. The infinite variableness of the ideal tree. 137 A pillow over the face makes a night. It feels like the wrong things are visible. Attention settles on convenient surfaces. The past is an embedded future. It’s time for a rewrite. Animated bouncing microbes from old science films projected onto the flag. One note from an electric guitar. Ferocious humping at every beach and rest stop along the way. Odd combo. Soft belly. Needy fingers. No poetry there. Nibbling stalks of celery. Antique silver pillbox wedged under an elastic waistband. Crick in the neck. Finding new kilter. 139 Steel pellets hit the window near the table I write this on. Someone is tapping on a computer keyboard in the next room. I’m using a pencil worn down to the wood. These sounds should be mixed better. All the time I’ve spent writing this book I have returned to this one specific incident. It’s not in my journal. I sat on the toilet. There were cacti in pots on the window ledge. I looked outside at the flat roof of the garage two houses away. It caved in as I stared. It made a loud unfamiliar crash that split my thoughts into two parts. The part that knew it had happened and the part that couldn’t yet believe it had. [44.200.249...