Fragmentation

            More concerned with poetry’s borders than its center…  Small stones in a line surround a deflowered garden.  They keep love from scattering.

            Lessening our language and ourselves together.  Saying little, but saying it precisely.  Digging out the sky with perfectly straight silence.  A beautiful hieroglyphic.

            The fragment’s seismographic writing:  it records the beating of precariousness.

            It’s the word of a man who dreams of poems.

            It’s a beginning of love:  it gives us the sign to exist.

            “Only the fringe of knowledge is moving.”

            Center of a poem to be.  Seed of the future tree.  Heartbreaking contraction of hope.

            There is no other possible song than the poem’s roots or its budding, no song before which all poetry is breathless.

            Destined in essence to remain incomplete, the fragment announces an absent work and a lost form.  It therefore allows the exact and suitable expression of the absolute.

            The world’s miniature and its epigraph.

            Like a prolonged hesitation between poem and prose, the song of a flute in the evening.

            The fragment is a language of beauty for death.  Its word stops short, it doesn’t affirm life but prowls around its outskirts, like a brand new ghost in the shadow of the living it loved.

            Neither failure nor minor form of literature.  Rather its lucidity.  The fragment can tell time by history’s dial, it knows how little innocence and hope it has left.  It says that everything must be resumed, restarted and recognized.

            Poetry’s sad, sad surroundings:  the ink and paper’s rips, rough drafts, sketches, all sorts of beginnings, the soul’s debris and bits of aborted flesh.

            Only the poem that assures the world’s gravity nests resolutely.

            Neither an art nor a thought, but another language, perpetually seeking its identity, and that parodies what it has lost.

            “It is in the form of the fragment that the unfinished is still the most bearable.”

            I write the fracture rather than the fragment.  The pen has become a scissor and pays attention only to language’s perimeter and its declines.

            It is less a matter of naming things than the invisible thread allowing us to perceive them and leading to the snow-filled trench where the word lands and suffocates.

            In olden pharmacy, they called “the five precious fragments” splinters of sapphires, garnets, hyacinths, emeralds, and carnelians, they were said to have cordial virtues.

            The fragment’s vocation is to reconcile the beautiful and the simple, wonder and thought.