from Drafts 1-38, Toll (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001)
Imagine a book, a little book, whose words are covered one by one with the smallest pebbles-- fossils imprinted, shale splinters, slag and gnarls from fossick, cheap sweepings arrayed, a road of morse lines step by step down the page. It looks like poetry, runs along depths on the surface, slugs of a text that is lost; the instruction it offers is delicate, maybe misplaced. The words and their syntax come not to nothing (for the lover of pebbles) but to an irradiating splayed out Something so large it can only be marked thus: + It could say erosion of the book. The pace of the traveller slowed along the Hansel-Gretel highway, given bits of scrap and cornbread that innocent birds go after, given shiny pebbles far too pretty for the story. The easy exit does not exist. The circumstance offers more. She had laid that trail to have it get effaced, in order to be abandoned to the scrub of a dark wood. + It says erasure so cunningly, mimics little words (flat pebbles), brings them all to the a or to the the of "be." Can choose to investigate. + The wordless words behind the blocked out words can be more compassionate than the word. The pebbled lines are filled with otherness; With only the speech of the stone, they gain in empathy. Reopen pity. + Deep ditch, road cut, folds of rock propose a book of the unraveling voice incapable and swamped in the same time as the self. There is a modulation of feeling "set myself this meditation" impossible project ready barely reading to begin. * Imagine a reader, who would resist and not resist-- Lightning flashes hot silverline domes over the mountain-- resist each word even the long night of characters, actions, choreography which reenact her plundering defiance, resist and still articulate the gloss, the implacable sweetness of the Stone. Narrative sections contain instruction, include statements about underpass and loophole do this, do that, listen, do not disobey, invest yourself beyond yourself for you are a representative of fire in the windy hopeless cavern, a spark unable to warm the dark but able still to see its flaring cries even without light, able to clasp the mists of loss. There is a space, a ditch shallow along the contours of earth this bumpy knoll or that hillock but deep enough to cover whatever for a couple of years, until it worms out its readable shard, its hoops of unforgiveable bone. Here to imagine the reader marked by another ring of mark a / a \ makr, all that morganlongne daag dawning, of the mist the missed for a meniscus tension of exhumation swells the page-- wonder fugue and segue, modicums of wander for the locus logos all along the shifting boundary bounty * Childrenhad gottenup to the attic hadtaken the boxedmemor abilia and begunto strew discovery the past became clutter upon clutter. There was no order, no size, no year; emotional response was totally mixed. What turned up, what had gone, where by accident something was into another box. . . . And the book of photographs no longer fits here, once it was looked at, thereupon put, or push, or pull it into, or out of there. Thus the random recovery of unresolved tidbits can never be assimilated. This is the condition of time, going forward athwart no matter the "gifts" of shame, fantasy, and memory, no matter the organic strangeness of irreversibility. This is the condition of time stuck all over (Merzhouses of Tyree Guyton in Detroit) with debris of temporalities gone (Merzhouses of Tyree Guyton bulldozed) nothing and everything plaster-faced dolls, plastic tops from margerine tubs, tin tea trunk outcrop along strata of ever-disjunctive folds, and smash. * Imagine it without the rhetorics of pity but not pitiless, O ruisseaux, o bull of gold and lapis, the tongue blue lapis thick with lyric and wine, caught in bosky lute trees caught for song, for song; the charm that licks your ear, Bos Voice webbed one way round with strings and wound by linen and pegs. To hold. Pressured against. The wood and sinews gut bound leaned into the plectrum like a figurehead drenched by rose. The bull plays within himself at the heart of the labyrinth. Can visit him dead bask in his anger and the dirty light of poetry and try it all again astir, that trenchant call across the fosse to activate something is it prophecy? is it instruction? is it mourning? Whatever the genre, let it "pass thru its own answerlessness." * Go stony book Step across Embrace the wraithe not as demanded in foundational commandment nor as refused in annihilating compleynt but just in the course of things casting oneself to the same winds. June-July 1996
