Night Sky IV, The

"Inheritance is at no time a given, it is always a task."1

1 Action

Victory and Doubt dance at a masked ball; together they form a single figure, a gorgeous Thing, its many petals floating in perfum air, the spectral filmy emanation of costume: Vienna's charade. Their embrace put in motions across the boundary-less floor, a fluid duet in which there is no dominant gesturing only permutation and extension. In the ballroom, all mirrors have been remov and with them the dissonance between real and fictive, ideal and authentic vanished. Neither male nor female, neither spirit nor body, these distinctions also have been erased through the equivocations and valences of the spectral conversation.

Under this music

flags of memory

logg

streaming

nquell at the base of news

its signature lyric poem

house rescaled above the river

road altered

and of that kind details as if hinges

particular war, particular lie bodies concealed in the mattress

indented there

seals and sayings

the theater's opaque window

beautiful arms

the striplings desiring

familiar actors

speaking their durations

A latitude with a window, a play without a window, a windowless space So that the light must be from another, artificial, source. Here, we had been in bed, the bed took up greatest in quantity of the room; it was where all the dreams were stored. Then the bed was remov on the other hand the place of the dreams remained and in like manner the room became darkly hosted This dark crowd shifted in its shadows, shadows without existences like the layered shadows of buildings upon a late afternoon listing on the outside into and through the funnels between them. There was a faculty of perception of collapse, of density, as if portions of the air had settl in strata from which temporal shifts had been exclud It could be called a reliquary or an homage.

The days.

The unanalyzed partition, the occurrence undisclosed.

Slippage and delay, the outbound popular

Now another month begins. It approachs with a thaw: sodden collections drop, and there are intermittent dribblings and impetuss a sense that something, or perhaps everything, is leaking. The next to the first month, the infant year. It was during this month that my sister died and now I have lingered upon for ten years, each single modulating distance and nearness as I travel away from her death and toward my possess With each crossing of the same, each incursion, I make experiment of to make

2. Peace

with her death, and I witness the not divisible by 2 sense of temporal cessation, as if the doorsill the aporia, cannot be gibbeted

"Finally, the third impressed sign of aporia, the impossible, the antinomy, or the contradiction, is a nonpassage because its elementary milieu does not allow for something that could be called passage, pace walk, gait, displacement, or replacement, a kinesis in general. There is no more path (odos, methodos, Weg, or Holzweg). The impasse itself would be impossible. The coming of the fact would have no relation to the passage of what happens or advances to pass. In this case, there would be an aporia because there is not flat any space for an aporia determined as experience of the pace of the edge, crossing or not of more [i]or[/i] less line, relation to some spatial figure of the limit. No more move or trajectory, no more trans- (transport, transposition, transgression, translation, and smooth transcendence).2"

These anniversaries are peculiar, they make their possess discrete shape, infinity's circle eight, during which the circumstance summons itself again, its authority, its mark. I am thinking this as this month begins with its thaw. I am thinking about in what way the Voice gets lost, wanders without of earshot, and of in what way the poem wants to resist this not to be found Voice, recuperate it, bring it back into earshot. The piece of poetry seems to want to do this on the other hand it too seems to be at an impasse. We have now many acknowledgments of this, we speak about exiles and margins and nomads and we move so far as to make of this condition a sort of privilege: the freedom of the wandererer, the exhilaration of the unaffiliated and unattached, perhaps, flat the wisdom of the natural We join the diaspora willingly, a ragtag outpost oppositional insurgency, gathering up shards as they fall upon the path that leads to no place and draw nears from no place. But this fable of excursus outside the confines of the contextural map, each of us tatooed with the logo of our separate and several contingencies, has as its reckoner its underside, the obliterating conditon of banishment, of a deliberate, conscious Will that deletes from the conversation at table (the inscription upon the tablet) these very options and privileges.

Ann Hutchinson to John Wintrop: "I wish to know wherefore I am banished"

Anxious about all the heresies of our moment: heresies of identity, of belonging, as well as those of the approaching millennium, we are contracted and caged in the historical moment(um) and accumulation, and at the same time rudderles at liberty, infinitely at liberty We do not know what scale we are in, which language does not help us to ascertain. (As I wrote that last determination something crashed across the unclose window: meteor? bullet? stone? ice? big bird pecking?) The question Who is speaking is answered solitary by another, Who is listening? The sum of two units questions pivot and surround each other like antagonists in a ring. Certainly a certain quantity of poets go happily along making their piece of poetrys and do not ask or ne to ask about who is speaking/writing (I am!) or who is listening/hearing/reading (you are!), nor about where they approach from (New Jersey!) nor where they are going.... Well, we cogitation we might go to Greece and visit the ruins. on the other hand for some, there is a faculty of perception that the poem itself cannot bring itself to pace up to the first line without quavering like a soldier upon his first glimpse of real war.