Draft 34: Recto

O pocks of broken asphalt

let it go back to weed,
                        the driveway that paved the 50s
            killed at least one tree

             all of many colors
             lustrous

             scraps
            scrips
                                                            of
                         seedy beech and clusters
             of leaf balls

             of old oak drays
                        pushed out from the tree
under a street light--there,

so--            refracting
                        fragments of squirrel life           
                        of squirreled life
            tumble into the space behind the space?
                        fraction
                        fiction
 into pronouns?
                        gather where the skittering gathers

having pillaged through “it”?
            having cited ecstasies “of” itness
bumbles “of” little objects
            thinning “of” crickets’ pallid run-down whistle

in order to mark
with a yellow-yillow hi-lite
“un petit bit”                                                                                                 
it in little, little in it.

That was a question
of what
I wanted to say--
“of”--
I am empty
this is true
there’s no point to it.

To push thru the deep dream station
            and still miss the train,
to tear up the stairs for the dream el
            running ever
never to catch it
            the token--hard to tell from money--
 hard to tell memory
            stuck unfound.

By the time all this occurred
and the one in the booth had used up
infuriating
infiniating
time,
the train was
as they say in the blues
long
gone.                                                           

Stranded
by the empty track 
I wanted to state flat things
without intervention
without invention --things
            of such evident rightness that
evidentiary witness
            with no retainer,

-- That what?
Then what?
            What would have been achieved?
What, anyway, was outcome?

Meantime “bad memory,
no donut.”
            But memorializing
isn’t the issue.

Thereupon
comes everything I did not
            think once to
            say, but now shall say twice:
                        That the beyond
is now
            (or not  )
                         in the surface

That the whole is strains “of”
            thinking what the whole and its fractions
                        come to

That it is--
and I’ve said only this--
a gloss on it
a gloss on is

glazed
            applied to ceramics
from rain.

And That there is a knife in the page
sometimes one can find it
given its addresses
its addressees

somewhere between recto and verso
in echt verses 
found penetrating.

That memory
            is blunt dull knife.

That memory also is a knife,
            but blunt and dull

a thing one wants incisive, but
            instead puts flat red streaks 

though sometimes it surprises
            and makes a ragged, fractal cut.

The whole is the knife that descends
and debate ensues
about the nature and kind
of the threat

but on the finger
that arrests it
changing the outcome
there is only one tiny spot
one pressure dot.

Now say that the whole
emerges from this
single interrupt,
that it is all
here,
angelic dot 
<.>
the complete address

with it being the point
of
pointing in the first place
the zim of zum,
the zine of zaum.

Then say that this dot is really nothing.
Really is nothing.

All kinds hair
all kinds dust
all kinds dots--
Traces of something both present and absent
throwing a little knot of dust and hair
suspended
            to winds
in another time
            by chance,
                        knot and knife
                        knife and knot
thickness of breath and care--
            notwithstanding.

So what’s more to say?
What’s to say more?
Open the door.

In the maror phase
in apples
            in binding
in honey
            error
too much cinnamon
     got shook in,
            shock in
splash,
more than a dash,

so add more wine, more honey
more almonds, raisins
rozhenkes mit mandln
raisins with almonds

            cut in more apple
to point more “brick”
            covenants.

Then a secret
(garam marsala) to taste.
Add it.
All of it, point blank. 

And afterwards,
            after words
                         with the door shut,
should I let Elijah’s winecup--
            a whole goblet, so hopeful--
just go to waste?
                              Not a chance.

You can see at a glance
            how I take my place
in a lineup of unbelieving
            Jews who
took the cup          and drank.

May -November 1998

Draft 34: Recto. “Un petit bit,” French novelist and sociologist Azouz Begag, in conversation. N.B. the bumper sticker--Bad Cop, No Donut. “Rozhenkes mit mandln,” an apparently folk lullaby in Yiddish, in fact composed by Mark Warshawsky. Draft 15: Little is the fold.