Footsteps in an
orderly sequence and therefore predictable. Enclose it in a sentient pronoun
and this monologue lives. An activity of mind carried a little further
and thereby: judgement. Now the moors seem imponderable. Now the spark
plugs show damp. Now the sentence repeats that the pumpernickel’s
stale. A strategy then of windows. Colourless, almost opaque. Just enough
to see you with. Articulate, the floor, the door crack, the switch, the
light. This room is not a room. This wall is in thinking. January 5. “Thomas
left us.” Precision. Not of cogs but machination still described
as important to a story. How narrative begins in a one that is all of
them. Suddenly, a theme.
They brought him home drunk and incapable at nine
thirty i knew
because i checked my watch which was eight minutes
fast nine thirty
six then actually then nine thirty one when they
brought him back.
“Thomas” (that is). Across the moors in a second
reference to moors (inexcusable as simile like a
dream of the factual).
The bad story begins. We had seen it earlier, a grown-up among utensils
I won’t bother to name. And so it appears to anyone who wonders
why the moors also were dispensable. Inscrutable, curvilinear, designed
of brass filligree with lions, gryphons, even a seme. The cost was a life.
The body deposited behind the public urinals on any street the narrator
doesn’t bother to name. The fiction thus evolves through social
Darwinism to the center of this crowd. A “public” weal of
“democratic” pronouns . . . . . .
Let’s begin again. Once upon a time at the Festival Descartes an
orderly sequence of expenditures took place beyond the moors. Departure
at effect seven: “the essence of Nature is freshly conceived.”
Now the coal seems deep and rich but overlooked. This is what a narrative
shift means.
Then it re-forms. The it re-affirms. It represents it as itself. This
story it appears as.
“This is a story that these words begin.” Finally to disappear.
You disappears. Your fiction reappears.
This is when this / then
is a plot.
All of the above or else
I was going to meet a woman who had left
a hat on my car.
Possession completes this. Not narrative.
1985-2002 Toronto-Berkeley-Toronto
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