I need to get a picture of what’s
going on: I’m not—only so far:
no one is: but something is, and I
need a picture of it: a trace, a
spoor, an indication even that might
lead up to an eventual outline, or
in the grossest possibility, something
3-dimensional: a snapshot, really,
before the actual flesh: garbage is
a socialized form: ground up in a
sophisticated, electrical machine,
it flows down the municipal pipes
to the county waste disposal plant
and then out, here, into the waters
of the mighty Cayuga Lake: or else,
paper-sacked, it is set out by the
street in clever plastic, lid-lockable
big containers, and a big truck—
driver and two footmen—passes by at
an approximately agreed-upon time
each week, and the big compressor
blade packs the garbage in: but
litter, litter is without centrality:
it is not budgeted, it flies in the
face of organization, it can be, and
is, dropped anywhere, item unrelated
to item, caught up into the wind or
down into ditch trenches: the central
image of this poem is that it has no
mound gathering stuff up but strews
itself across a random plain randomly:
I don’t suppose the universe was
thrown away that way (do you suppose
it was) and perhaps even litter is
governed by certain dynamics of flow
so that it is not truly free: a
heavy frost would keep paper down:
a hot day would dry water off
cellophane: a fall of leaves could
lay some banana peelings to rest:
distribution has its own meeting
places: with litter perhaps the
central image is harder to find, made
of subtler tendencies, harder to see,
a greater invention than a mere
locale: anarchic and anti-agglutinate,
litter draws one into the resources
of depth, matrix, and vector: one
must learn new forms of containment
or else rehearse the resistances of
freedom