Curious, this querying letter from a stranger.
              Just when I had in fact
turned back to begin,
              it made me think again
where I had been.

Wash of the day, bitterness, and what observation to make?
             how the basic primal

                        luck

of having emptiness on this scale

operated. Or occurred.

Blessed, one could say,
              with a bad, with almost no
                            memory,

gifted with it,
              the flower was always
                            false forget-me-not,
tender blue, very like the real,
              those sugar’d golden-pinky eyes
                            but not right, a lack—

something
              of how the texture of memory
                            puckers with

slippage.
              It’s never what you think.

Something — an extract or essence of something else; this work
pressed
down        unfinished        overwritten        refolded

iota. That fragments are “conspicuous”
oracles. That the veil of mist behind which stars
shimmer and show
was, in fact, the Milky Way itself, not clouds at all,
            nor close;
That the diasporic
                            scattering, scattered even in the “home”
talmudic
                            aura of endlessly welling commentary

folding and looping over

IS.
                            Like it.

                            It is.

And that was it.
It sentenced me for life.

The beginning was, as these things go,
negation. But
‘twas also setting forth of signs to read or tell.
Moonlit refraction by a strange heap
counted on base “N” and on base “Y.”
Yes and no. Both and and.

And inside that beginning
the no no no set out, unrolled
its grave and merry way,
winding a lane but in a trackless sense
through scudding days, on awe-scratched bumps,
over the design of hills perpetually
blustered with cross-drafts and wind-chills,
spiraling and knotting over itself:
the vulnerable.

Underground, streams of stone
hiss and percolate.
Super-heated gouttes
pop according to the vectors of physics
to form, as they fling,
the drop-pocked texture of time.

It’s a cobalt time spent in the wilderness,
ugly lure, and sullen tasteless fish,
guns galore and ready to roll,
which is simply the time here,
time spent observing
small hopes begin the oddities of journey,
time spent hearing
mournful hoots at venomous crossings,
time spent trying
to step step step quivering silver prongs
of struggled tuning.
Time contaminated. Time full of dimension.
Time wrapped over a family of apples,
mourning polished by wonder.
Time again and time again,
that runs clear out
into the starry randomness of scattered far,
way beyond the articulate limits of syntax.

Pause     space     work     space,     inside emptiness
                                      to write is to drown, rip tide, rip time.

Pause work, false work, milky work,
                                      time and tide in wait for nomad.

Aged dog, her murky running eye—
                                      dawn time, even tide.

Nits and gnats, snits and snats, born for the minimum,
finite, finished, fermished
and dead in a minute,
into the air a little spill
as invisible dust-threads spot shimmering down
and swim in beams of ever-mobile light,
named fixedly, obsessively,
tenderly, “hunger”
to honor who and what we are.

What a joke. What a job

endlessly
to research objects, colors, items, targets, designs
caught in the mottled crossfire of time.
“Those were gunshots huh?”
“Yeah an your dead”
and so they were,
unmistakable,
with a nervy echo.


                                          *

It’s because I ran out
of paper that I’m writing this
on another draft.

So here and there
a stranger word
comes through.

It being the only canvas
wide enough for human sadness.







The material in italics draws on, but alters, lines of “First Dedication” in Anna Akhmatova’s “Poem Without a Hero,” The Complete Poems of Anna Ahkmatova, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer. Boston: Zephyr Press, 1992, 545. This Draft begins the first fold; it corresponds to “Draft 1: It.”