Diaries by Rachel Blau DuPlessis


 
 
1. Exterior
 
On scraps of paper and in
pocket-sized notebooks
 
were numbers of busses
in widely spaced cities:
 
“best—63 or 83” scribbled,
National Museum of This and That
 
but in what city? And
“179. Connects at Pioneer.”
 
Nothing personal. On the front,
end-of-the-line street names.
 
Flash of a window, another life,
tremulous perspective on
 
an as yet unnamed
heteronym, since,
 
as the repository of her wanderings,
she wants something tremendous
 
from any notebook. So this one
is just trash. Nothing. Wants
 
every memory linked to its locale.
Every mark with a plausible rationale.
 
As if accretion and details, one next
to the other, could ever evoke
 
the oceanic quotidian. That’s why
a diario extime appealed to me.
 
“Exterior diary.” No intimacy.
No description. Just fact.
 
 
 
 
 
2. Interior
 
Now I want to ask some questions.
Is our privilege painful; or do you think
 
we can make good use of it—
Better than others would?
 
Have you ever mixed your own glue?
Did it stick? for how long?
 
Then ask: what do I want.
Because it’s always doubled or more.
 
Every page—it’s a monoprint but done
in series, each varied, slightly altered.
 
Are you sure that’s a monoprint?
Are you sure you know what you’re talking about?
 
Is your resistance to norms a real choice
or just a chi-chi genre paradox?
 
Remembering one thing that was
the thing I thought
I wanted, when or
 
whenever I had set these
things aside to “look at later”
forces me to the side of the road.
 
It was never the right time.
This is ridiculous.
So when is later,
 
I have to ask you,
is it now, cannot
get any later than this, right?
 
Truth to tell
it could get even later, but
even the question’s problematic,
 
no time to reflect
no time now to make
what I might want:
 
Which is pure Alterity—
a poem like nothing ever seen
or heard in the realm of poems.
 
Now it’s I haven’t practiced enough.
Now I set too much aside.
Now it’s gone dead, compromised.
 
The sorrows intercut
and time itself, the concept and the fact,
are baffling; today’s already shut.
 
 
 
 
 
3. Never Written
 
             Why must you run before you walk
always? And be tripping over
these confusions, like extra legs.
 
             Can’t you be content
with a stable graded surface
on which to take a nicely spandex-ed jog?
 
             When they said “Break a Leg!”
you didn’t figure how that
was metaphoric?
 
             No, you have to want what’s
damagingly impossible–what’s your point?
An extended page, some quotes cut from newspapers
in which trailers of other lives, straggles
             of string, or ripped fabric
                          half used paper
                          half-readable notes, public debris
 
envelopes written on the backs of
             tie to other trashed pages
                          picked up in a flurry
 
for a phone number, a shopping list, a diagnosis,
             a texture,
                          a world-evoking color,
 
a word collage including bits and bots—what
             are you actually trying for?
                          Is this some mode
 
you think is manageable?
             And after all those years, to learn so little?
                          Why can’t you simply be content?
 
                                                                                           2018-2019
 
 
 
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, poet, critic, collagist, is the author of the multi-volume long poem Drafts (1986-2012) and the collage-poem NUMBERS (2018). Her newest project is a multi-book long poem called Traces, with Days. These are Days and Works (Ahsahta, 2017), Late Work, forthcoming 2020 from Black Square Editions, Around the Day in 80 Worlds (BlazeVOX, 2018), and the book from which “Diaries” comes, Poetic Realism (in circulation).