She screams in her stain
less box as a drama
unfolds or floats
by … so you say,
sotto voce, I’m alive.
And
just like that: it turns,
the tide … even if such
susurration only
exposes jagged
deposits on brackish
seafloors, crop
circles burnt perfect
on grassy meadow
lands, even if such
obvious redundancies
as these just expose
corpses, our grubby
hands and their strangers’
fingers all riffling about
History’s compost.
The title’s all she wrote, Muriel I mean, on some scrap. Why archive this signal? I’d like to
imagine she was writing about herself, then hit the closet wall. Probably, though, had more to do
with chasing Boas’ ghost. She was always doing that, when she wasn’t claiming squatter’s rights
on his letters she sat on. When she finally broke open, she just vented in a Westbeth elevator,
Vietnamese jetsam and spunky jissom floating by, on top of Hudson filth. And this is her political
voice? Codeswitching between silence and shriek? Was this why she admired the quiet doctor’s
ASMR, the third way of the collaborationist who whispered affirmations to the Hitler-Jugend
about how living’s still possible between readings from Rilke’s prayers to the angel of history?