Ledger 1:
So
I dismantled it.
Mounted it and then dismantled it
but its uncanniness,
its Nessie in Loch Ness-ness
lurks and snuffles and sways.
So—once again.
Wrapped and unwrapped,
floated and dried—
unruly it. I took it up
(I took it on), and twisted it
to find—to make—
its seams and splits.
Rapt and ripped.
Made and mined,
brooded and unbound.
The grains of sand,
uncountable mysteries
of former shells,
the layers of misty color
over the nose of the moon—
I tried to honor these
endless metamorphoses.
The poem being stoppage
in a flow of dynamism—
Does one want to take
that way as path?
Blockage? fixity?
Prefer each poem’s
daunting, empathetic form.
Its ways of exceeding itself
and of losing itself
in strings of letters,
split strata of ur-URLs.
The universe red-shifts to hypertext.
A set of clicks across the umpty
black and brackish
“atom-o-sphere”
A
ah-ah
ba-ba
ca-ca
sha-sha
da-da
set of sounds, a few more marks
and all gets made again. But differently.
It will cough its spute-y bit of phlegm
reach for one of a hundred me-pty
filed and wrotten
helpless notebooks,
a.k.a. not-books,
and unbegin
ungain.
Made and unmade,
mantled and dismantled.
“The word ‘last,’
used in describing the poem
in the written instructions,
looks, some days or in certain
slants of light,
very much like ‘lost.’”
It has been “finished”
but has barely begun.
It has been collected
but then has disappeared.
Lost and found and lost again.
It re-emerges in the little split,
in in-between.
And it has blown
to the ten fingered winds
(they’d be “of time”)
up through the reddening changing
changeling leaves
as they shimmer before they fall.
This is marked lento
but also prestissimo.
Contradictorily.
Do you read me?
Letter 1:
Dear X—
Well, just like that. Abrupt.
It’s a letter to you, right now, certainly,
though not without pre-history.
A story webbing among packets of letters,
held with rusty paper clips,
found in random files.
A territory of
pre-quels. Priors.
Plot is sticking out all over and
yet these events aren’t linked
causally. Things happen, one
adjusts—and keeps talking
in pulses of feeling
that propel correspondences
whenever one responds “Dear X.”
“The immense text of the world
is born from these few
non-hierarchical marks,
as equal as the text is infinite.”
Maybe I’m simply saluting a letter.
Or marking “X” as if I could
not pen my name.
In fact, all letters
will finally arrive at “X”
whether by obliteration or by various
divergences of path.
Seek at once to enter into
the vast universe
and into intimate smallness.
This is enough work
to go around,
enough to go on.
There is no middle ground.
Dear X— no middle ground,
they say,
but that’s OK.
I know you’ve shown a
complex composite desire
for the doubled, the both:
It’s clear you’ve always meant
both crossed out
and crossroads,
both erasure
and choices of direction.
Find: “Seek at once.”
Word has finished searching the document.
The search item was not found.
Still I’d like to think
that we are on
the same page.
Ledger 14:
My eyes close over the keyboard,
in hypnogogic grayness,
as if writing were sleeping
or other semi-conscious state
and I could speak from the site
as if I were right inside it,
instead of always traveling to it and
Zeno-like, dividing the difference.
What are the tasks at hand?
Oddball mosh of residues
vagrant, flagrant
fragments, with clear haunting.
Rope is twined stringently
by twisting cordage
out of threads of matter.
And then a winch of pressure has to pull.
After? Entanglement, entanglement.
A jerk or pull will maybe open it.
Or perhaps tie it further, harder,
impossible to break the swollen, tight-bolt knot.
Then one unwinding strand of light
dropped from the sky
plumb down onto you
in and through the quiet night.
It could be the string
of a gigantic instrument
whose resonance involves
a tightening spiral.
What’s the twist? In your face
are tangled voices of the dead—
you never asked them enough questions,
or listened enough to the answers, either.
Letter 15:
Dear E—
Splash up
(from the lake
where you have sunk).
Ensconce right there
sitting in the chair.
You are full
to the brim with cancer,
certainly you will die
but you waited up for me,
leathery brown and tidy,
just like a mummy,
with your feet encased
in squirrel slippers
made of road kill.
Huh!
Flitch these fusty quarter-sawn
tinder-logs of the past,
for the present, for the future,
wet as they are, soaked to the brink.
Declare them all operable!
Pile them up!
Can the sphinx poem be written?
Well, this is it.
So you aren’t dead after all?
Oh, yes, you are!
What an interesting debate.
If rueful on both sides.
And haven’t the slightest notion what there was
actually inside you and have lost
all ways of finding
out.
“O music of these chthonic forces”
raise yourself into all the active orifices!
Ledger 15:
One page of one book
is clear, but I can’t read it
as it’s German with words like
water white green and other words
that look like
“things wandering”
but are
“Dinge verandern”
which I think is the otherness of things.
Makes sense to me, but still
even wrong readings of
otherness and wandering
have not so
implausible
similarities in the Blick.
Blink!
I only want to please myself.
To make degenerate art.
(if Isaac had been a girl—
he would have been Iphigenia?
But she’s the one was killed.
It’s what we mean by toll.)
exhort
siege
war
forensics
girls trying
to learn to read
FUBAR
These intersections are made by one of several tools,
though all the tools seem harsh, incompetent,
for the tasks they have to do.
And this does, too.
I did not want aloof
vantage, small figures, dense mass
for my sense of scale
I wanted
pixel by pixel
themselves
detailed individuals
even if collapsed
into a botched tracking shot,
I wanted them each
being endearing selves.
And intransigent.
O thin watery clouds of twilight!
O the seeping of snow
the slow
subsiding
peeling crystals
layered down to dirty slush pack
under new snow
leaking water from the side
as run-off,
ruisseaux, oh!
O education and liberation
so desirable for the wanderers, the exiles,
and the excluded!
O staggering women!
You’ll never ever again be exactly the same.
Letter 16:
Dear M—
Will you walk out with me,
cross north and hike through
that mountain terrain we have both
so longed to see?
Day by day, haiku and haibun,
the oaks and pines
will shake their snowy folds,
and mounds of rime
will fall on the passers-by
as the intermittent winds strike them.
We will verify
place names and road signs
as to how they fit our
volatile moods.
Frozen Falling Water.
Snow Shoe Trail.
Caution: Stress regimes
in the lithosphere.
This trip is unfixed,
in its complex variables,
harmonic maps and
immersive symmetries.
After a few days of “everything possible”
(You have a choice
of paper or
hard cards;
you have found a faux-ceramic vessel
lined with 100 amusing questions),
we return to “nothing is possible.”
(Erasure becomes a metaphysical problem
of mourning for what
you don’t even know
once had existed.)
Then we strike a balance
as if striking a brass gong.
Bong. Yes. Bong.
Awe and dissatisfaction
reverberate with
magnanimous overtones
and bind us individually
to our separate, sonorous bodies
and to our marrow-laden bones.