Crossfall Considered
I began writing Crossfall poems before I knew what the word meant. Then:
Crossfall = “The transverse sloping of a roadway toward the gutter or shoulder on either side;” “The shape of the footpath at right angles to the direction of travel [Italics mine to stress the Oppositional].”
I found myself facing a term remote from common parlance — Linguistically Undocumented — that teems with a multi-faceted fertility. My mind outpours ——> suspension, liminality, threshold, meander, trespass, flâneur, rupture, rebellion (off the beaten track, the roadway, the routed), in-transition, passageway, destined for transformation, for liberation from the cast-upon, the culturally conditioned, — across, crossover, . . . crisscross.
The ‘fall’ that triggers bewilderment: being Lost in pathless places, tossed into a discontinuous present, shook, fragmented, . . . confounded for want of a plain road. Seeking Re-Constitution.
Through bewilderment we find our way.
Crossfall: the dislodge that Transforms.
Crossfall Prefigures
antennaes warble trance vibrato
congruency plunder
seer
FORM:
— breath batten
— hunch prism
cycling offal divination ferret, rumm-
aging absence’s toolbox,
brushfire,
gaps brick possibility, the mortar
of future, the indemnity of
shape
Crossfall Transfigures
breakaway pommel mist
prefigurative perch
remake, renew, . . . emollient ex-
ude . . . mustang coral clownfish reef
conversion peak where disjoin
jointures
— carillon jalopy
— ragged loop
dishevel the new momentum
how much of
transformation
is
relent
muster edge stammer, the
border called, primed, to enjoin, . . .
fray pierce wobble
lodge
*
The ‘stammer’ offered here is envisioned as primal impulse, as an Essential Approach for breaking-through. In Will Alexander’s words: “… stammering in the language, that pure, pure fuel, that flint where it flakes off….”
Or Gilles Deleuze: “It was Proust who said ‘that masterpieces are written in a kind of foreign language.’ That is the same as stammering, making language stammer rather than stammering in speech. To be a foreigner, but in one’s own tongue, not only when speaking a language other than one’s own.”
I’m visualizing ‘border’ here (3rd line from bottom) as synonymous with what Heidegger terms ‘boundary’ & is seen as an assist not a forbidding. Heidegger states: “… the boundary [border] is that from which something begins its essential unfolding.”
‘Called’ hinges to Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking. “The old word ‘to call’ means not so much a command as a letting-reach, that therefore the call has an assonance of helpfulness and complaisance, is shown by the fact that the same word in Sanskrit still means something like ‘to invite.’”
‘Call, then, as initiating the invitation to ‘appear,’ to come-to-be. See ‘CALL’ in Shift Gristle (Black Widow Press, 2023) p. 41.
Crossfall Augurs
implies
in the bluff of an heraldic intransigency this
larch destiny
clamor skein
taproot
odd waters
dicing through percolate loaves, offal wharf, bone rummage, metric winch, ——> the fetch to articulate racks the gauges
tessellate
delineate
columnize
CROSSFALL SLINGWRENCH ALTERITY DIVIDE
comeuppance jagged brawl partial-
ize winnow occlude
interdisciplinary hollow
fetch
what came before to make it so. defile. denigrate. degrade. quail-bass quiver excess bask. they call it history. summer & parts. holistic fragmentation. piety. history seeks to acknowledge. without knowing why. nor how. spurious applies to most human endeavors.
. . . & then
even so.
through the trestle blink. eye for an eye. upstart before swallow.
it’s a matter of heart. too many cooks in the kitchen. use your good arm.
nothing was quite the same since.
CROSSFALL ANTEDILUVIAN BLUSH
addled culpable, delinquent, a ringing
in the ears, the fragility of
testimony, . . .
where stone traded in shoulder, hauling the
wreaths of legacy, the odd accumulations
dragging on dorsals, drugging their
counterparts into compliance
from the heave of sanctimonious reflex upswells
this
vivification
CROSSHATCH hinges to Linda Lynch’s drawing “Bluff No. 4.” When asked how does “Bluff” configure with “Crossfall,” Linda offers: “reverberations of the tumbleforth between the bluffs in the drawing: an accumulation of events caught in the between crevice gap of the bluffs, a falling forward from the vertical slopes, buffeted by winds of many eons, gravity, momentum of movement where it can only go, contained and falling at the same time, sloughing off of material debris, detritus loosened tumbling forward . . .”
in the tumbleforth crevice clutch crosshatch thrall-fall
of
alchemical junction
chime sluice garden
atomize customize
vector
surmountable edges, elsewheres, repairable clause, fulminant patches, a
quarry gone bedlam . . . . blare bleak
bamboozle, dangle encroach traverse,
winnow occlude trench
luffing
in that pre-deliberate innocence, accumulates jostle/torque, .. dispatches foil correlates, intimacies blister, the wrath of a dying djinn,
serendipitous stumble, Fathom Shifter,
rummage, prong-sift burrow,
ferret,
sift rut prod
disc-curry ricochet
plumbpulleyponder
pith snare trap omnibus relay, elite horizons canary thunder, the throb that tribulates (aqueous tremble),
[suppling slackwise
membranous leak
[a ruse
riddles bareback
wind
scramble, both brace & buffet, breeze &
breath, vent ferocious,——> bruise
lilt-loft, ——> float
rumble through the foretell of mineral,
tourmaline, gases, éons, grasses & plains, shape & dis-
figurement, the bind of a
pebbled tensility, . . . a tasseled
geomancy
jumble broth
jangle spur
sediment
what deep warren clench coats the perimeter, muses
these bluffs, these crags & pits, with their mute
emptiness, their prone telltales,
spiral a dance of (void)/
what wobbling oath
fructifies, mills
to a froth,
abandons
