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THIS ESSENTIAL DRIFTING: collaborative work by Megan Gannon, Miles Waggener, and Joshua Ware

January 1, 2010 Contributed By: Joshua Ware, Megan Gannon, Miles Waggener

Viscera in the spillway: a china-box elongated,

or italicized by antennae, search lights heliotropic
              with smooth-tongued, fraternal flumes

for the low-flying, forgetful               of what would be no more
important than drinking tap water in a floodlit room,

a nearly offensive, comatose flux
              a split-level fracturewarned-against, rolling
                             in a science teacher’s open hand.

Coiled liquid in a drain halving, haphazard splashing out,

glass thermometers split for their mercury,
              a simplex wickerwork
a silver-fox flush boiled at dawn            drowned in vapor lamps and batteries:

They weighed her down with the number eighty, ultraviolet
and a crystalline light.

         Euthanasia, they said, it’s more in the taking,

1.    something of the pond she could never give back.
2.    ticking quanta of buttons in a jar, wing-rush or
3.    a third unnamable
4.    “a third unnamable,” 2
5.    “or Worm, old Worm…won’t be able to bear” 3
6.    my skeleton-bride or Alameda on Sunday
7.    another wry belated ladle in a player’s hand
8.    soon as written the code kept cracking
9.    batteries, batteries, batteries flapping signage above the greasy bays
10.  and the smell of butter wafting, wafting.
11.  [null]
12.  steel axles, analog tape, and double exposures.
13.  Gilded limbs heft the porcelain heavenward.
14.  14) And the wind turns into an emblem

Or current.  If fish be farthest from fowl, consider
              starry slots in nethers.  The jar’s lip opens to the idea
of night sky, cattle tank, snagged sumac on the power line.

              Both hunt like this. (He sweeps a hand over his face.)

Over his hand he sweeps his face, and in August, hunters
squint through the idea of light, not light itself.

An undressed moment snagged             in moon-jars
will be depleted by dawn; this is what we will call
              aesthetics, or at least, its memory.
Or neither of the two.

Fold the taxonomy of bough and shallow in half; hold it not to the idea of light, but light itself.  Squint into their doubling: a hint of starry ether somewhere out-of-hand.   Consider the old map’s nostalgia, the jaundiced and flaking bits of avenues bisected by interstates and industrial parks.  Run a finger down the length of it:  No quedaban palabras en mi memoria.  A su fiel prisionero, then you sign your name.  Not a half inch below this,

                                                                                                                                            all we could bear.  As soon as she put an equal sign after the word, the naked welter of the town silenced the arrows’ neon, dark among the horseshoe of oleanders, spilling luck onto rutty Yucaipa.  You’d have to dig pretty deep to find its foundation.  We still own it: the felt-marker frown we redrew in hours we never knew we’d miss.  Of course I remember:

“Thinking involves not only movement of thoughts but their zero-hour.  Where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions, there it yields a shock to the same, through which it crystallizes.” 4

So, instead of writing “They weighed her down with the number eighty, ultraviolet/ and a crystalline light,” we could instead write “Deep in ultraviolet, they weighed her among memory and oleanders: an attempt to silence steel-hymns amid fields of industrialized parks.”  Perhaps this shock, the tension doubling back upon and through itself, is a different way of becoming:

aphid slip-
stream,

indelible
hunch-

backed theology:
crab

dried dream-

bones in her
patterned

ocean-
body:

 

flowchart

 

“In so far as exchange is a process, by which commodities are transferred from hands, it is a social circulation. The product of one form of useful labour replaces that of another. When once a commodity has found a resting-place, it falls out of the sphere of exchange into that of consumption. But the former sphere alone interests us.” 5

her nation
changes,

her ocean
resting-

place
of ships’

seeming
circulates.

This is what we will call the channel’s lacing: an unlasting gate that drops the absent frequencies we breathe.  Or.  Breathing, breathing: absent frequencies unloosen aesthetics: dim the idea of light, not light itself: drowned vapors: we sink to the bottom to see what it’s like: our labour replaced with a resting-place.

 

* * *

 

1 From Jacques Derrida’s “Signature, Event, and Context”

2 From Megan Gannon, Miles Waggener and Joshua Ware’s “This essential drifting”

3 From Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable

4 From Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”

5 From Karl Marx’s Captial

 

Return to table of contents for Issue 2 Winter 2010

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: January 1, 2010

Further Reading

[AGAINST THE PALE-BLUE ENAMEL] by Osip Mandelshtam (translated from the Russian by Alistair Noon)

Against the pale-blue enamel that April makes conceivable, the branches of the birch-trees stand and gradually turn into evening. Their pattern is sharp and complete, the stiffened gauze is fine, like a drawing that someone has neatly traced out on a plate of china. Some merciful artist has performed that design on the glassy heavens, […]

Mẹ Thiêng Liêng để trong bụng
by Tam Nguyen

To dream in your Mother Tongue / and stuffed, / consider it a success; // regardless of what it means.

“A simple HIV test…” by Dionisio Cañas
(Translated from Spanish by Consuelo Arias)

A simple HIV test, a memory of the luminous countryside, a time before this fear, the lightning bolts of love, the morning after, the glistening dawn . . . all we wanted was a bit of tenderness. Happiness, just one more crime. Poetry instead of theft, life cut short in each encounter. We loved so […]

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