by Dionne Brand
We all stood there for some infinite time. We did weep but that is nothing in comparison.
VERSO 56
This is what the clerk thinks: lemon documents, lemon factors, then lemon, watch lemon, lemon nails, wasp lemon, lemon summary, slap lemon, lemon dangers, lemon crevasses, there are a few documents that came, lemon defections, why allow a certain kind of speech, lemon vines, lemon ankles, distance lemon, lemon knotting, bay lemon, lemon reaches. This is what we have.
VERSO 57
Violet kilometres, violet snares, violet bookkeeping, violet whimpers, official violet, probationary violet, scabrous violet, violet early, violet itself, violet becomes, violet gravity, violet respiration, better violet, violet terminals, violet asylum, criminal violet, violet coast, this is what the clerk thinks.
VERSO 58
I was one of three wives in Cairo, one of three Blacks in Hanoi, one of ten on a suspension bridge, one of two people. I left my Pa at the Ossington subway station. At the tomb of Ho Chi Minh someone touched my hair. Not everyone wants immortality, or longevity, or to know the meaning of life. Only freedom matters.
VERSO 58.1
“But, Madame, are we not human, can we not speak?” This, from a silver seller in Khan el-Khalili in Cairo. Are we not human, can we not speak.
VERSO 58.2
“Do you want a little something, a little amusement?” This, from a stranger at a sweets stall. “You don’t want a little something?”
VERSO 59
A quieting, but a busy kind of quiet. A rich quiet. I love to wake up around 5 a.m., go down to my reading chair, turn the light on and read. But there are rules.
VERSO 59.1
Violet ambulances, violet openings, violet terminals, violet hours, weather’s violet, populist violet. This is what the clerk says, blue-ribbed. Blue quarrels, blue diastole, blue steering, blue expenses, blue mileage, blue havoc, blue appliance, blue creeks. The clerk continues, the sedge of blue.
VERSO 59.2
Passengers may leave small parcels or packages in charge of the collectors of stations…packages of luggage so left will only be delivered up to the party presenting the receipt granted
The reading regimen is as follows—while writing poetry, read philosophy or natural history; while writing fiction, read poetry; after, but not before or during writing poetry, read fiction. These rules of reading keep the compartments of poetry and prose fiction pristine. It is really the poetry that demands this regimen, it is a fragile and impressionable art so all means have to be employed to protect it from excess while feeding it with infusions of practical, scientific, and philosophical propositions. Almanacs.
INDEX 1
Every listing generates a new listing. Every map another road.
Verso 4 (to verse)
Verso 7 (controversy)
Verso 9 (to furrow)
Verso 10 (elegy)
Verso 10.1 (inventory/agape)
Verso 19 (poema)
Verso 0.1 (strophe)
Verso 21 (xylem)
Verso 22 (latifolius)
Verso 34 (amphibrach)
FORM AND/OR REFERENCE TO
Verso 9.1 (Inventory’s last lines…)
Verso 10 & 10.1 Inventory
Verso 11 (reference to Ossuaries and the pages w/o verbs)
Verso 14 Ossuaries and “Venus”
Verso 34.2 (Inventory)
POLITICAL PLACES
Verso
LANGUAGE
Verso 8
Verso 8.1
Verso 13
Verso 13.1
Verso 17 (lemon)
Verso 35.1 (blue)
Verso 35.2 (analgesic blue)
Verso 36.1 (blue, violet)
Verso 37 (blue notebook, grey)
Verso 38.2 (violet domestic eases)
Verso 41.1 (violet)
Verso 42.1 (violet)
Verso 44 (the archive—the end “the sense of orange”)
Verso 46 (violet and blue)
Verso 47 (blue letter)
Verso 48 (violet)
Verso 55 (violet and lemon)
Verso 56 (lemon)
Verso 57 (violet)
Verso 59.1 (violet and blue)
PLANT LIFE | BUTTERFLY | APHID | LADYBIRD
Verso 1 (The back of a leaf)
Verso 1.1 (aphids)
Verso 6
Verso 15 (aphids)
Verso 15.2 (aphids)
Verso 20 (mourning cloak)
Verso 20.2 (mourning cloak)
Verso 21 (xylem)
Verso 21.2 (bryozoa)
Verso 22 (latifolius)
Verso 25 (aphids)
Verso 25.1 (aphids)
Verso 33.3 (ladybird)
Verso 34 (amphibrach)
Verso 38.3 (echinopsis atacamensis)
Verso 41.1 (aphids)
Verso 43 (smokebush and wisteria and rooms and piles of paper)
Verso 51 (aphids)
THE DIACRITICAL
Verso 2.1 (the potions deleted from the Versos)
Verso 2.2
Verso 2.3.1 Diacritical through to sentence that ends with Prospero
Verso 3 (syntax and more)
Verso 4 (to verse)
Verso 6
Verso 6.1
Verso 7 (controversy)
Verso 9 (to furrow)
Verso 11 (the effort of speech)
Verso 14 (also ellipsis)
Verso 15
Verso 15.1
Verso 17 (War Series and “Venus”)
Verso 19.1 (adjectiveless)
Verso 20.02, 21, 21.1,—ellipsis
Verso 30.1
Verso 32
Verso 32.1
Verso 32.2
Verso 34.1 (the concerns of the poem)
Verso 44 (the archive; the word)
Verso 45 (b/c “Rage armed Archilochus…”)
Verso 53 (the dust of grapheme)
Verso 54
NOTES ON THE HUMAN
(Toward the diacritical as well. The stress not just on a word but on a being. Making the human. Making the unhuman. The author’s left side, the line on her face, the human zoos.)
Verso 17 (War Series and “Venus”)
Verso 40.5 (Monk, Nellie, Coltrane photo—shares same number with the following)
Verso 40.6 (Daguerre)
NATION | THE DOOR
Verso 5.1 (newly numbered…beginning In December)
Verso 5.5
Verso 10.1
Verso 17
Verso 17.2
Verso 22
Verso 27
Verso 32.2 (Locke)
THE SEARCH AND ARCHIVES (JOHN BRAND AND BENJAMIN/BAUDELAIRE) THE SEARCH AND WHAT IS NOT/OR IS NOT REVEALED/THE ARCHIVE AND THE CLERK’S TAKE ON THAT
Verso 16.1 (Benjamin / Baudelaire)
The clerk notes, even Angela Carter’s reconstruction fails in the sentence that continues “…she clutched an enormous handful of dreadlocks to her pubic mound.” What madness is that?
Verso 22 (John Brand)
BRAITHWAITE | JABÈS | BENJAMIN | ELLISON | STEIN
Verso 13.1
Verso 16
Verso 16
Verso 16.1 (Benjamin)
Verso 19.2 (Stein and Toklas)
Verso 21 (Jacques Roumain)
Verso 21.1 (Márquez and Marsalis)
Verso 21.4 (Ellison, Invisible Man)
Verso 21.5 (Harris, Palace of the Peacock)
Verso 30.2 (T.S. Eliot)
Verso 32.1 (Plato)
Verso 32.2 (Locke)
Verso 34.2 (Inventory / Neruda, Lorca)
Verso 45 (Horace)
Verso 46 (Huidobro)
ARTISTS | PAINTERS | MUSICIANS
Verso 3.1 Basquiat
Verso 17 Lam
Verso 18 Lawrence
Verso 20
Verso 21—all iterations
Verso 21 (Roumain)
Verso 21.1 (Márquez)
Verso 31 (Mingus)
Verso 32 (Mingu
s)
THE CITY
Verso 3.0
Verso 3.1
All of verso 3s
NOTES THE AUTHOR HAS
So many cigarettes, the Clerk smokes, even though the Clerk does not smoke but Deleuze’s voice sounds like 700 cigarettes. Gilles Deleuze in L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze—interviews between Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet.
Edmond Jabès translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, The Book of Questions: Volume 1. Aisha Sasha John pointed me here. One night we were talking and the next morning she sent me Jabès.
Why do you have this fetish with bibliography? the clerk asks. It’s the fever of coloniality, the author answers honestly for once.
The Arcades Project. Walter Benjamin translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, The Arcades Project.
To find the preface, the Clerk had to scour and finally Leslie Sanders called Sergio Villani, a Baudelaire Scholar who found it. André Suarès’ 1933 preface to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. Then the Clerk had to have it translated by two people, including Martha B. It took me years, the Clerk said. To tell the truth I was looking for something else in Benjamin when I came upon Suarès. What could it mean?
“Here I am singing,” she said, “…I have arrived at the great mountain range of the heavens, the power of those who have died comes back to me, from infinity they have spoken to me. Here I am singing.”
The Clerk and the Author went to the Venice Biennale, 2015. They heard the voice of Lola Kiepja; they wept uncontrollably. Word for Word. At the Latin American Pavilion—Indigenous Voices it was called.
Charles Mingus—album liner notes—Pithecanthropus Erectus.
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, Three Lives. Christina Sharpe led me to this. The index. Say no more here; please leave it up to me. I have only shown you 59 or so of the Versos. But, one last thing. Degas. I’d forgotten Degas in New Orleans. “And then I love silhouettes so much and these silhouettes walk.” His family’s wealth came from those silhouettes, as you may imagine.
The Clerk and the Author made notes, different ones on each occasion. 1926 New York Herald Tribune, Apollinaire quoted in Apollinaire exhibit, Musée de l’Orangerie, Apollinaire’s things, the Clerk wrote.
Wilson Harris, Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination. Austin Clarke led you to him though you never finished reading this. Never but always.
Handwritten note, near his glasses at Neruda’s house in Isla Negra “Te recuerdo como eras en el último otoño…en sus ojos peleaban las llamas del crespusculo y las hojas caían en el agua de tu alma…”
The Horace Anthology: The Odes, The Epodes, The Satires The Epistles, The Art of Poetry. I reminded you about Horace.
Jean Rhys, “Till September Petronella”. Impossible to leave that story.
Selected Poetry of Vincente Huidobro by Vicente Huidobro, translated/edited by David Guss.
Kamau Brathwaite, DS(2) dreamstories. Very important for dreams, the clerk says. See the public record. The whole category of dreams begins somewhere here.
THE ALMANAC
Trinidad Official and Commercial Register and Almanac January 1882.
RECTOS
Thought for the rectos—there could be / perhaps should be several iterations of them. To appear and disappear the capturing perspective…
Verso 25.1 (hmm / another sense of the diacritical / the stress…)
UNNUMBERED VERSOS
Verso 2.2 Keep
Also the smell of work somewhere in another verso
Unnumbered versos?
One night in a taxi in Lima, the raw umber lovely night. No lights.
You felt a vast exit on your right shoulder. You said to the driver, Is there an ocean?
He said, Yes, the Pacific.
Then you both were quiet.
WHAT THE CLERK DOES ON MONDAYS
Mondays the Clerk wakes up
60 small mistakes to be corrected
200 incidents of Blue
in her ears
traffic under these circumstances
disciplines
hinges
protein
violet respiration
gorse, lizards, never, coast
written lemon
factors, asylum
VERSO 33.1
If I see a patch of corn, in front of a house as I did this morning, or a zinnia bed, or a wrecked mattress leaning on the side of a house, an emotion overtakes. Not one of sadness as you may imagine, you being you, but a familiarity, a grace of some weight. I might even say longing, because it occurs to me that in the zinnia, the desultory mattress, there used to be hope, not a big hope, but a tendril one for the zinnias’ success, or the mattress’ resurrection—the nights slept on it and the afternoons spent jumping on it. And then the scraggle of corn fighting waterless earth. A small, present happiness and an eternal hope, even also, joy.
If I see a patch of flowers near a road surviving heat and exhaust fumes and boots, a homesickness washes me and I am standing in the front yard looking at zinnias. The dire circumstances in the house behind, the material circumstances, the poverty, are part of this homesickness. Not because, one, the scarcity, and two, the zinnias, set each other off as some might think, but because they were the same.