THIRTY-SEVENTH DAY

& if zombies are an absent presence
& ghosts are a present absence
& if i talk & do not stop whats left

what words leave behind
my best friend's father just died
but his son just started to look for land

snails when i visit we wave & proverb
around craftsman houses lifting up
long succulent leaves of plants

i dont know the names of & trace gummed           
apple shiny residue to shell & from shell
to underwater face of snail his boy is three

or ten doesnt know yet how to
contract does not yet believe in contraction
says every part of the word i can not

he says to his mother i will not he tells her
& it is political yes why not his father asks
i must not little C says because I can not

& this is not circular
& this is not the snail
& does he not sound just

like the state just like the limit of reason
just like where we can see edge & seeing
can ask if we are the ones here who decide

where we stop where to stop where
we will have stopped where we will
have stopped as if we could stop here

__

THIRTY-EIGHTH DAY

the ashen hoof again dead
words dead parts of the body
like nails like a grey hoof

like a ground down tooth
like split ends a miner
in the back of the class says

philosophers need to just say it
quit beating dead horses
& a preacher asks like who

& the miner says like me
& he names the mines
& the names of the men

who died in the mines
& the day they died in the mines
& the preacher says brother, that

is it but then the miner kept on
& now theres no end to the thing
or edge or roof & not enough room

in any poem now theres just pattern
                                                                                & _waste_

__

These are two excerpts from a long 45-day diary poem that I wrote while translating Lorca's Danza de la Muerte in rice flour around 40 Wall Street. I was mostly reading Cesaire's Discourse during the writing of the whole poem and mostly reading Foucault's '78-'79 lectures for these two days in particular. Miners in Tennessee get tuition waived in community colleges when the mine shuts down and based on anecdotal evidence I believe they know like poets know which is something like seismographically. Below is a picture of one of my first days translating on asphalt on Wall Street and one of the many misspellings.