for Aija Uzulena
Erasure, illegibility
are partnered in
transparent epiphany
as whatever comes
into the disappearing
act that all act
immediately becomes.
There is no other
means to be present
but to become
the penultimate
"step behind" all that
through which the first
piff of magic
steals your flesh
by giving its name
a place in syntax
no longer your own.
Why do we love this
"feeling of belonging"
to the still center of
drama gone awry,
its orgasmic shimmer
that takes us forever
away with it?
The pagan way is
still our way, we
children who line up
alphabet blocks
over and over until
we come to the sequence
that finally allows us
to disappear into
our love of attempting
such arrangements,
ecstatic and toxified
by the terror of
selflessness finally felt.
We enter the semiotic
stream, attached to
all that to which the signs
refer, the inevitable
tragedy of being led
down the garden path,
not because there is
either path or garden,
but for the presence of
these as analogs
for the confusion
and heat that rise
in the heart as
a form of bewilderment.
We go beyond ourselves
not by will, but
that we are simply
taken there, as amechanos
as Hamlet, for it is
not for us to decide,
but only to push against
all that seems to
determine how wrongly
we perceive the changing
positions we each occupy,
around the sip of
each expurgated midnight
cup or petal of some
stranger's rose, all
to the end of neither
knowing nor not-knowing
throughout the means
of every aching occasion.
To erase is to mark.
There is no inversion,
no rabbit-out-of-hat
switcheroo difference
between night
and day that is
telling enough to do
more than pray
that much more to be
present to the cloud
of pink diffusion
whose center we
mistakenly believe is
as black as Celine
or the kerosene smoke
that makes damp
stink in the January
streets of Damascus.
Erasure is the step back
that is nothing more than
stunning. That we can
"see it all" remarks on
how mere, how plain, how
lovely is our incomplete
sense of our own
illegible occasion. See
me. Show me
the spots on the dice.
And in so doing,
mark the distance
through which to spell
the nameless rush of
all that you can love.
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