Fragment

"Always, with the fragment, as with the essay itself, there is this ambiguous shuttle between identity and dispersal, between formal, almost physical integrity and a fracturing or even pulverizing action."¹

I currently live a fragmented life. It is temporary—the fragmentation, the life—but it often seems boundless, as I alternate between time zones and modes of attention (or rather, degrees of wakefulness; I am so tired of living here and there). Today I am in Washington, D.C., and I slept four continuous hours before waking to a cry in the dark. It was a cat, the neighborhood's geriatric stray. A week ago I was in Houston, Texas where the neighbor's wind chimes sang catastrophe in a wind rioting before storm. If I am not careful when entering an appointment into my Google™ calendar I will be tracking the days in Eastern Standard Time while living in Central Standard Time. And so, in Houston, I arrive an hour late to yoga class, finding a darkened room, bodies everywhere lying in savasana, a.k.a. "corpse pose."

Some days I am a mother; I warm the milk and soothe real and phantom wounds. Some days I am looking out the window wondering what time it is. About wind, a friend who works in energy tells me Texas has an abundance. We were in D.C. having this conversation while our children tumbled down a giant red slide. All that wind! I was explaining that I was in D.C. for the week but would be in Houston for the next two weeks. What exactly do you do again? he asked, perplexed by the designation I give most freely: English professor.

In fact, I am a poet. I write. More precisely, I read a lot and respond to what I read, and this often warrants writing. I write as I think, with scant resolution, in a form some might call "fragment." Given this, and given my dilemma with time, I frequently read fragments:

from the very moment any voice is conceived whetherphysically realized or notmanifested or notto the very moment (if & when) delivered²

A fragment can also be a poetics, as these lines by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha intimate. Excerpted from the textual experiment "audience distance relative," Cha nestles her quatrain at the center of a page. My decision to read it as a quatrain speaks to the formalist bent of my imagination. Must it be a stanza? Cha was a media artist; "audience distance relative" was first published posthumously in a book that includes a storyboard and stills from a film in the early stages of planning. Best known for her book Dictee, a hybrid of poetry, memoir, language primer, collage, and photography, Cha made texts that defy literary genre and stage, above all, a visceral encounter.

On the page preceding the fragment, in a larger font, in bold: "between delivery."³

Language confronts me, and I feel that confrontation in body and mind. I feel the blank space as my silence meeting hers, a space that mirrors the distances between myself and others—speaking subjects, interlocutors, future experiences, the selves I might yet become. Such space feels like time, how Cha's prepositional phrases proliferate: "between" and "from" and "to." It is a fragment with a sense of direction, a map of ontological potential. What does my voice deliver and to where? Who will I be then, there?

To read a fragment is to read the contours of incompleteness. And so much has been left incomplete. In Cha's fragment, the movement from conception to delivery measures what is fleeting and also endless, as incipience is endless, from what is impossible to say to what might be said. The interrogative "when" stands at the edge of answerability. The drama of this fragment lies in what is not articulated, thought suspended like a held breath.

"or not," Cha permits twice, inviting variance rather than indecision. Meaning is a series of possibilities, interpretation a fluctuating practice. "or not"—like a birdcall that punctuates Houston's humid silences. "or not."

Out of one fragment, more fragments. A proliferation...