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Rachel Blau DuPlessis Draft 111: Arte Povera

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1.

It’s all impossible
the gesture impossible
the language impossible
the suture impossible:

a feather bead
                                        kept in a useful bundle, with
                                        one thing after another, mica, baby teeth,
                                        satin fabric, weathered pebble, twine,
                                        each layer wrapped and rapt.
                                        A veritable vertigo of
                                        “assemblages...”


2.

One and one and one make 111
by some calculi. Some tumuli.
Some cumulus or cumuli.
A house of clouds, its corridor
“shells, feathers, mirror, glass,
seaweed, sand and cut paper,”
opened onto a similarly
encrusted room.


3.

In the world as such
DNA dumplings
(with thin skin wrapped around them)
spatter recklessly
(unwittingly? uncannily?)
because of randomized events
in a politics of explosion.

How then?
Shaking with the instability
of calculations,
more in anger than in fear
one “shows one’s work.”

This is written entirely on off-cuts.
an internal translation of itself
marking shards with mackle.

It’s true the work must be redone.
This time scribbling mirror-wise,
an addition(al) problem
with uncountable vectors.


4.

Suppose after all this, one just listed
house, book, mug, window,
daughter, dogs (gone), desk, Apple ™.
Suppose it was budded tree limb, hair-thread fingers—
the baby oak in spring, rain “heavy at times,”
and the cleared branches of fall, suppose
yellow gusting in a greeny-pinkish light,
a dark red pear leaf blown into the room,
suppose a salvaged shmoo-like basil plant
eager, even in winter, to give pesto,
or a fondness, a warmth, eros
blue as the sky, could it be otherwise?
the apt healing of a wound, even with
its startling scar—
unaccountable enumerations:
the oddly glistening, the half-started language.
The half-startled. Twisting together
choice exemplars of exquisite debris:
“a cigar label, a metal buckle, a ballpoint pen,
a bottle cap, a bolt, a hair curler,
a drafting compass, a plastic bottle,
yellow tape, aluminum foil, drinking straws,
green paper,
broken blue glass.”


5.

Would this be enough?
What would be enough?
It is never enough.

The task is unfinished,
the persons, unfinished.
The structure is unfinished.

Verso becomes a promise to turn back.

The sum total of “old furniture, planks and upside-down drawers, cardboard cutouts,
scraps of insulation board, discarded light bulbs, jelly glasses, flower vases, hollow cardboard cylinders, mirror fragments,” with foil sheets of gold and silver covering it all.


6.

When she had no canvas,
she took the wooden back
from a broken dresser drawer,
a board spotted, stained with dirt and with streaks
of paint jobs, color of the walls,
and painted a rag she saw hanging from the window
painted looking out from her window:
wall of brick and saturated rag hung limp,
the spots of grey, the grey spots on the board of the dresser
are now the snow falling, dirty, through the city.


7.

It’s little things—a turquoise baby ring,
a shirt, upholstery tacks, cancelled stamps,
a box, a yellowing obit, and memories
of disasters of the past, or simply fountain pens,
or paper scraps with the writing
of the dead, or lists,
to speak of sheer lists,
that don’t recognize
themselves as offering an outline
of rescue, of witness, and of care—
What can be done with them?

Part of the strangeness of writing,
the despair of it,
its ridiculous pretense,
and its nobility – is —
no song nor chime can be proposed
to animate regrets so small,
twisted and suffused
with our enormity.

The sound of this
is far more jagged, more like chunks:
“lilting Sprechstimme, synth dub interruptions,
howling tapecut-ups, and dust-bundles
of fuzz, static, and noise.”
“You will know
that you will never know.”


8.

Could list cloud-names
for the world’s puff,
wisp, nacre and elegance,
moving above the world’s implacable substance,
billowing over death, joy, rage,
lies, irreducible fractions
—over it all.
Poetry is not the goal.
The goal
is something smaller,
something more direct.
It doesn’t seek for “poetry”
as overarching rubric name.

Wants simply to be present to itself,
neither to slide into astronomical despair,
nor into minutiae and only those,
(“shirt collars, sample skeins
of embroidery thread,
rubber bands, shoelaces
and old darned socks”),
but still the stuff still shines.
It accumulates scintillation.
It is impossible to avoid
fractions of joy.


9.

Get all this down in time,
the collecting and sorting,
the car mirror smashed, the gusts of trash,
the candy wrappers on the street
bright with sweetish silvery-paper shine
against concrete.
And “metal, glass, neon, slate,
wax, earth & wood,” facing
“air, wax, mirrors, lead,
newspaper, neon, pipe, and fabric”—
each mirroring each.


10.

Runnymede, Mnemosyne, a little brook
a little book, a little brucha,
a la-dee-da, a deed, you nested idioms
you vestiges, you remains,
these assemblages for
mixing things and words,
the ledges and ledgers,
the noman-dic measures
of sheer blessing,
the orange sun,
the storm/orage,
the orange moon:

you are instructed by the inner voice to
“bring all this with you into the silent room”

and also to carry a messier collect:
“scrap metal, off-cuts of wood,
broken machine parts, torn fabrics, buttons and coins.”


11.

Mendicant
envoys

present themselves
as if prescient
about their own responsibility
to resist abandonment.
They will address
the imprint of our time:
interpreting its murky path
with the force of their postulates
about the unfinished.

We have an unreckonable fleshy pile
of the damages.
We have an unrecognizable fleshy pile
of the damages.
We have the cantata of anguishes,

“the enigmatic sigil of more, for, there, now, without, not, if, already, save, who, I, when, neither, henceforth, he, beforehand, ah!, et cetera, etc.” and/or “le sigle énigmatique de plus, car, là, or, sans, pas, si, déjà, sauf, qui, je, quand, ni, désormais, il, auparavant, eh!, et caetera, etc.”