Draft 38: Georgics and Shadow
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
What did the work demand?
What did the work demand?
The knot.
That the question he asked.
Simply to go inside the fierce exactions of syntax and be answerable.
Shadows fall in every extension.
And detail. Time’s rocks in space.
Ecliptic flaneuses.
The work exigent: “thought taking time.”
Knot of string and rope and thread and leaves, all scales juncted unravelable.
“… wanting the tones and even the effect of its silences …”
The affect of its silences.
Tried to take soundings. No half measures. But the truth was—
The imagination of the ordinary is unimaginable.
The work gets woven from and knotted into its own shadow.
The work lies wrapt in its own shadow, cast back.
How did this work work?
So now what, now exactly what?
By knotted soundings. It said it all again.
There could be gestures; gets hard to avoid them.
Although what’s done is done.
Insistence is a kind of elegy; the plumb a commonplace.
Wanted also social justice.
Does the elegiac sap, or motivate?
Nothing is inside the work, but everything is. The stillness of things not still.
To say is, is, is again and again, is very simple, very painful.
Absolute toll.
Every word teeming and bereft.
What are the tasks of the work?
Is time soluable inside (these) things?
The word means ergon—work, on the geo—land.
Work, despite insomnias of rage.
As a genre, the land of poetry.
Material time is linked to our softness, we fold over ourselves.
“I painted this cut branch by mixing ink in mist.”
The exacerbation of the precious.
I sat in a room made of stone. Between the two, a third.
Such small stakes within the endless.
I wanted “a kind of mutedness” in words, silence without silencing.
Don’t misunderstand if it is engraved in stone there on the “path of time.”
The clots on the paper came from mixing ink with ash.
Could not decide between “it” and “is.” So I left two midsized pebbles.
Cotto chipped at the lintel. Forget you’d ever said “center.”
Untranslatable blots or shapes whose very blankness testified.
When did you finally know you would enter time by writing?
Around the razor wire ringlets wound plastic flags of ripped bags waving.
Saw thru, thought then.
Saw of, might have been if.
Is it Lyra in Vega or Vega in Lyra?
The clouds were curdled milk. My heart leap’d up at that.
How did you set to work?
Has any work gotten done?
I went roaring to the end of the runway.
Affirmation doesn’t enter the absolute space.
Turned observation to observance.
Shared a self with the revenants.
Set out utensils: freshwater jar, and brushwater dip in the form of a furled leaf.
Way wide brown grey muddy.
Dreamed I set up darkroom in my mother’s deep closet.
The monument was a chute.
Wanted social reverie, and then change. A fantasy.
“It” on the right side “is” on the left. A-moving, all a-moving.
Answering questions set by the dot, sited and forceful.
Chickadee, nuthatch, cardinal, junco, titmouse, house finch, and big mild doves.
What about any rock? OK, Rock.
Was the name Rilke, Rothko, Roethke?
In the work as rock can sometimes see roads of the world.
Was the phrase secret bliss, secret place, secret police?
Sometimes not.
Take it all as a loss.
And mis-typed “throught.”
Systole, diastole, evisceration, copia.
How did the work begin?
Was there a certain moment of identification?
Began 30 years late ago to set my own bees flying.
Salutations, teenage flowering pears, dark cypress, silvery olive, and squirrel-clipped tulips.
“I have a long history of starting.”
Histories of startling.
The scratched crystal blurred the numbers. Perhaps it was right I lost my watch.
Salutations. The work is the horror of poetry as such.
Our names were missing from the title page of the book. Our work as if invisible, us shadowy, anonymous, unnamed. This was an irony only at the time.
Background of cancellations into which floats up the fad for acetate jackets, chartreuse, fuschia. Or a name: Vivien.
A good little girl. DP. Post-war.
Tell loss. Telos. L is for Tally bone.
Tiniest skipper salamander. First person pile.
How does the work proceed?
What are the impulses for new work?
I make “choráls out of random input.”
I make thin perambulations of loss.
Washed thru downsluice in gold and pink shine, I remain shadow.
A day inexplicably white with one goldfinch. The tongue of the bell.
Hearing the collusive chortle of collegial laughter.
Sent it snail mail, a response that rhymed.
Could experiment with a fan-shaped format. To toast your three-quarters skid and flashy slats of loss.
Eventail.
To time! L’chayim!
To Memory: “the thing I forget with.”
But then I wanted to sing in Erse, an unknown-to-me northerly language, sing and sing in Erse.
Hey ho silly sheep.
Those old moon-gegenschein songs.
Tinted hallucinated cloth.
A set of poems, ancient Chinese, selected and translated from “the Nineteen Old Poems.”
Whereas I feel the same way.
Yet when there is development, it seems banal; when there is aphorism, it seems incomplete. When there is tone, half-tones seem excluded.
Did it want gaps? Guesses only.
Make the whole work an Etruscan votive hearth—lustrous toy objects for serious placation.
Make a David Smith’s “The Home of the Welder”—imbedding shards and symbols onto one plane, four walls. Little bronze house.
OK agree each work is the carcass of a cicada, green and silver-white oddity, a lost shell.
OK agree each work is a valise packed tight with allusions, a traveling kit.
Event. Taille.
Just a patch of volume there.
Claim nothing, then move on.
The underspeech is always diasporic.
What are the details?
How do you choose, or do you?
Swinging the bong of a bell inside memory makes a sound no one knew was hanging there, and which, when you listen for it, was the hallucination of poetry.
Parlons, parlong, parlone, parole.
Sweet flakes of time, amber insistence, and dropped daily, are called manna.
Letters scatter over the roads of earth.
Little gold dot on the glass that shines, is where everything is.
Cannot see for the deep dark, but the heaving shadows, bush and bliss.
Every letter is the inching of history, seen from so many miles, it is just what implacably happened and closer up, grief after grief, error after error, profit after profit, scarification and burning, the knife swung above the body. Initiation into what?
Wrestled all night. Gave way. No blessing.
Were there other bearings on the work?
And what other transfigurations of letters?
Holocause. And effect.
Doubles in unspeakable shadow.
Writing goes recto to verso, memory the other way. Poetry the wobbling pivot.
To orphanhood! Given these enormities, this has got to be our central tenet.
Sound. Hinge.
Wing of air.
Waves.
Assize.
Slowly the particulars scatter to the wind, starting with that shirt the color she used to say was “toy koise.”
Do you still believe in the theory of the shard?
The word Unto.
Backbeat, hey ho.
“I make things because I want to.”
Surface and beyond in one fold.
“They became little museums of the commonplace.”
Coated with dilemma, bereft of story.
So resist “that ancient injustice toward the transitory.”
So jump, mote, into the dancing whirl, despite powerlessness.
And work until it tolls.
And work until it tolls.