Debris Field (a midrash for RBD)
(toll)
To sentence is to seizure.
(that much we agree on?)
A caesura cut in space/a splice
or white ribbon tying
& untying anguish
to language.
“What then is the size of the loss?”
Is it measured by the darkness of the archives
where each word clings
tenuously
to its orbital aura — a page, a scrap
a frayed map
singed at the edges, standing wave
reverb.
Catapult, elegy, expenditure.
“Every word teeming and bereft.”
Murmur nocturne, weep aubade.
(pledge)
At night the <altered> precise
possibilities for <stopping> speaking
dissolve <persist> into the whiteness
joining a blink & a <disjointed> waver —
“the beyond
is in the
surface”
weaving calliope migraine
to reclaim the remnant, translating
the dead out of their rubbleinto a language of messianic
shimmer
Yeah, but the old franchise on dulcor
is kaput.
(torques)
“To thread thru rant/a wire”
“to write just small, though hungry”
To fall asleep
in the low ghost’s
strange hope
for words.
A question
mark makes
a world by
marring.
But living is what comes before
the amends for living.
After is for making
the broken into
letters that can
regather
the scattered.
A poem is a séance
between any
two persons.
A point anywhere along a line
running from ruin to gift.
(pitch)
“All serifs are seraphim,” folded in the
margins, the unruly dream
of a text that would
mend an alphabet.
But if A = null-a
the impossible repair will
always be deferred.
Aptly, the trace of
disaster scores
what it carries —
a continual sonata for
escaping
entropy.
Splathed across
its full range, it lights
itself by
fracture.
Jagged hosannahs where
enigma becomes kerygma.
(surge)
Is this a book?
No, but each letter’s
a rift/in the hinge
of the text.
Distance elides us. Letters recombine.
God, according to the Sefer Yetzirah, only needed 22 to create the entire world —
how very thrifty of him! But we grow older in letters, wearied by them, worried
by them — how do we re-invent the letter?
Inside
the vacant room the letter
drops to the floor.
The white saw of its ash
cuts a groove
in the grain of the wood.
And the operable lexicon is swarming with bad apples.
Yet disaster is also
song, its splendid
crowbar
smashing windows, prying locks
cobbling
thatness out of shatteredness.
A spidered quire barbed with
fonts of sunlight. A
gathering of signatures crowned
with burst bind.
Everything’s outside the text
but it’s still books all the way down.
On Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Edited by Patrick Pritchett