Draft 111

Draft 111: Arte Povera Rachel Blau DuPlessis 1. It's all impossible the gesture impossible the language impossible the suture impossible: a feather bead kept in a careful bundle, with one thing after another, mica, baby teeth, satin ribbon, weathered pebble, twine, each layer wrapped and rapt. Vertige of "assemblages... found and fabricated... plywood and knitted wire" 2. One and one and one make 111 by some calculi. Some tumuli. Some cumulus or cumuli. A house of clouds, its corridor of "shells, feathers, mirror, glass, seaweed, sand, and cut paper," opens onto a similarly encrusted room. FeministStudies38, no. 3 (Fall 2012). © 2012 by Rachel Blau DuPlessis 681 682 Rachel Blau DuPlessis 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." It's true the work must be redone. This time writing mirror-wise, an internal translation astir in unaccountable directions. 4. Suppose after all this, one just listed house, book, mug, window, daughter, dogs (gone), desk, AppleTM. Suppose it was budded tree limb, hair-thread fingers of a baby oak in spring, rain "heavy at times," and the clearing through of fall, suppose yellow gusting in a greeny-pinkish light, suppose a shmoo-like indoor basil plant eager, even in winter, to give pesto, or a fondness, a warmth, eros blue as the sky, could it be otherwise? the dark red pear leaf blown into the room, the apt healing of a wound, even with a sometimes startling scar— one cannot stop collecting the Rachel Blau DuPlessis 683 oddly glistening, the half-started language. The half-startled. Twisting up together choice exemplars of exquisite debris: "a cigar label, a metal buckle, a ballpoint pen, a bottle cap, a bolt, yellow tape, aluminum foil, a hair curler, a drafting compass, a plastic bottle, 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. Using "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 everything. Though not in mine. Not in this zone. Here's just intermittent bits of silver-gold. Being not and nowhere near a "Throne." 6. The little things—a turquoise baby ring, a shirt, upholstery tacks, cancelled stamps, a box, an obit, often 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 684 Rachel Blau DuPlessis 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 all wadded and suffused with our enormity. And even so one cannot even cope with those. The sound 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." 7. Could list cloud-names for the world's puff, wisp, nacre, and elegance, moving above the world's implacable substance, billowing over anything—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 the minutiae and only those, ("shirt collars, sample skeins of embroidery thread, Rachel Blau DuPlessis 685 rubber bands, shoelaces, and old darned socks"), but the stuff still shines. It accumulates scintillation. It is impossible to avoid. Get all this down in time, the person collecting and sorting, the car mirror smashed, the gusts of

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