AROUND THE DAY

IN 80 WORLDS

RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York

Around the day in 80 worlds

By Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Copyright © 2018

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza

Cover Art: Rachel Blau DuPlessis

First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-305-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017954220

BlazeVOX [books]
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Kenmore, NY 14217
Editor@blazevox.org

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+1

“This must be said.

I am provoked by the state of things.”

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+2

So many people can make artful shapes.

What is it to make art like 2nd sight?

Art that sees the sickness.

It is another practice. It’s no longer poetry

slotted in the groove we know.

Something will begin to overflow,

it will improv; improve only sporadically,
angry with, confused
about the normative and untouchable limits
of artful moves, elegant turns,
rationales.
It will appear annoyingly illegible, gawky
on purpose,
perhaps readable
only in gaps. Gasps.
And still the person making
will plod on.

Stop! Isn’t that too much?

Too much what?

Too much to ask.

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+3

Traveling is a crash course all at once,

in
“everything”
(you callow word!)

but because you feel thirsty, pee-ish, over-stressed,

losing yr place on the map or app,
uncomprehending
incomprehensible,

you feel stuck

in the uncomfortable. And ignorant.
Not to moralize or anything.

15


+4

If anything it
was more foreign, more confusing,
memory where?
in the here and not-here where,
dispersed, no sense of
why, this moment of social ecology
(social eschatology?)
too much to write down

so traces
only

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+5

No one mentions
as you memorize vocabulary,

that people drop syllables and elide.

Speak speeding up. The way we do.
No one tells
you that music will be playing, fluent folks
chatting cross-ways
ambient noises getting louder and bolder
as the moment itself accelerates,
and you give up entirely
just as that list
of high-frequency
usage (not even difficult!)
irregular verbs
that you memorized from right there on page 58,
evaporates.

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+6

“‘Bound by no rules, and for myself alone.’”

myself along

But right there that’s the painful part.

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+7

Summer 2017,
like summer 2013 with more home-grown
fascism—also a heat wave
so blistering, so major, so airless,
so debilitating
that with care one can just barely
get through it

but if you think

(as you turn the fan on—not even AC
here in the country—
hoping to get a little cooling air stirred up
via a little electricity)
of what it actually means

you are overcome

with a pit-caving sadness

the way it feels—the long view—

to think of onrushing
habitat-depleted
extinctions.
Like animals. Coral.
The lizards up and down the walls.

Water sinks deeper down

hard to be found
and fertile land
undergoes
rogue profit-grabs
fake “planning”
and desertification

that might once, recently enough,

if rectified,

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have allowed encroaching end times

to be somewhat reversible.

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+8

I am feeling bad
I am feeling sad
I am feeling glad
is nothing much, is totally banal, but all at the same moment?

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+9

If language is too plain

no one will care. If it is too vain,
that's the same.
Plus loss of honesty.

22


+10

Is travel
is another notebook
is imaginary and
is green beyond here?

is a meta-notebook and perfect, the notebook of one's dreams,

the notebook
that captures the journey, the poise, the pleasure lifted beyond,
without impediment,
the distant beauty
and artifacts
of the dead time in the
way-distance of the
cultured memory-
trace, and you poised
as chief appreciator.

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+11

Also of course then (t)ravel, the rip, frustration—caught on a plane

for the keen anxiety of de-icing, hoping that the take-off comes
before the re-freeze, caught by a river in dry seasons and no boats
going, wrong path, wrong road, wrong town and—what a surprise
for Bashō and Sora—no rooms to be had in this flea-bit village.
Not even one straw mat to share. It's a sheer dump, that's all, and
they wait, bored and peckish, to be able somehow to leave. Nothing
to see, nothing to do. No bus with lying-down seats? You mean sit
up all night? internet connection for the tickets not working? Can’t
even get a haiku out of it?

Reading a free METRO-style newspaper in a language one does

not know much of. Sort it out? No, you’ll never. Always some
noun, some verb or worse, some nuance assumed because everyone
gets it. But I don’t. Nor do I want to pose in the imaginary
(poetic?) notebook, where it’s perfect. Poet looking poetically over a
landscape thinking poetic thoughts. I don’t have any of those.

The uneven? the unsure? the ridiculous?

the shards of scrappy scraps?

Why are you asking me:

Am I some authority on debris?

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+12

I liked that well-traveled path OK.

It was easier to accede, to go into mufti,

to be the girl you were born to be

but I could never get into it, never get it,

not for my whole long life

or even for part.

It slipped, and I wouldn’t hold onto it—

even when I (somewhat) tried.

You might say, by the middle

of things, I had lost its way.

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+13

Did all the keys fall off my typewriter, off the keyboard in a clump.
Not all. Not at all.
Did all my teeth fall out in that dream? No! only a few. Did seven
or so keys fall off my keyboard in a clump? And how are your teeth?

My “I” had already fallen off that keyboard, but when I press it
hard, it clicks back on. Of off, Of on. On-Off.

When I press it very hard, sometimes it will write iiiiiii until I erase
what “I’s” I do not need.

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+14

Why put one more word

into the world?
Especially one more word
after the end of the world.

That feeling of now and here is

dramatic-sentimentalized
but contains a real terror seeded inside it,
though now-time is not no time,

not precisely.
That’s too extreme.
But something's going on.
What is it? What is the meme?

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+15

This heat wave now has a particular name; the name is “Lucifer.”
Critique: name mapped on religious fables. Yet by now the weather
is mainly man-made.
Luckily we have not lost our water; some people did, wells have run
dry, and they have had to buy drinking and washing water.
This is a nightmare. It makes you thirsty.
It’s nice, I guess, to say “lucky.”

Some are beginning to say: “climate catastrophe.”

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