Tuesday poem #54 : Rachel Blau DuPlessis : Letter 9: Dear R,

Dear R—

and here's another other alphabet.

Leap into your excess

and compound the crisis. Deepen it.

                        It’s language talking through

itself --

to the void then. In which

this all takes shape.

                        (You the tube from end to end for echoing.)

Language wants language.

It uses us. It might as well.

But agency is ours to tell.

This is an endless process

of turning inside out and reaching back:

                        alimentary, my dear R.

The whole story of creation

is a displacement (a mystification?)

from actual human fabrication. Thus

“Stolen wages built this State.”

The cadence of a slogan

helps make (make do with?)

this cross-hatched system.

For still the objects made

stare back: it is their aura

                        (which is our labor once removed)

that makes us weep

and weep surprised

until all dry of tears

but not of care.

[from Interstices. Subpress, 2014]

Rachel Blau DuPlessis [photo of the author reading at Kelly Writers House in Sept. 2013, taken by Al Filreis] is the author of the long poem Drafts. Her newest book is Surge: Drafts 96-114 (2013) from Salt <saltpublishing.com>. The first  of several "interstitial" works, Interstices is due from Subpress in 2014. Also in 2013, translations of Drafts into Italian and French were published: Dieci Bozze (trans. Morresi) from Vydia editore and Brouillons (twenty works trans. Auxeméry) from José Corti.  She is also the author of the feminist critical trilogy, The Pink Guitar, Blue Studios, and Purple Passages.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan