15.
Can’t have it too empty. Can’t have it too full. Aware
in any event, of jumpiness and then settling.
At least a cryptic outline:

shadow words slouching shadow-wards;
images rich in the intensive;
bird call knots and frilly tn-nhh trills;
flowers in the feathery grass, grainy, peppering;
items in a series shot through with the inexplicable . . .

and so on.

16.
“A little epic” but hardly
vivid or learnèd; digressive
but never gets anywhere specially, but here.

All sublime and insistent moments, quick send-ups inter-cut
all realist wandering
diagonal
saturated
exceeding itself
if it’s really lucky
picking along the narrow space
in the pressure zone
between y and n.

17.
Is it just about line, form, intention, drip, bands?
Is it just about drape, conceptual comment,
the rupture of assumptions one way or the other?
Axle? Axis? Ekstasis? Indifference?
Chance, luck, loss, contempt,
is it just about illusion, allusion, citation, repetition?

All of it,
friction, template, almanac,
all about every word,
minute-by-minute
responsibility
mise à nu,
discretionary of slang,
rife numerology and intensification of snap.

It is always involved and involuted,
not at the center of
the day, but always Uneven,
always Odd,
always Off.

18.
Painstakingly to translate once Anglophone words from French or Italian back into English, or from English to English, or from anything to anything else, watching them shimmer, modulate, differ. Or accidentally to find writing—who did that? Words arranged so, from the damage of days in the general seeking and shattering. These words remind a person intermittently that something had occurred and is still occurring, and this happens over and over, so that the whole, someone might say, is one poem articulated a hundred-odd ways, yet, at the same time, the whole is so many different works that it cannot be unified or accounted for. This could be called a failure. I mean, a pleasure. (Precisely to have failure—on that scale and with that level of stubbornness—was one of the few things I foresaw.)

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