POETIC

REALISM

RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York
Poetic Realism
by Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Copyright © 2021

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 by Rachel Blau DuPlessis.
"Poetic Realism," 7 x 10 inches, June 2012-August 2020.

First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-375-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945848

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

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ETZ/ TZE

Undeclared enigmas
wander bumpy and
flecked “betweens” until

one day
are five brown birds
gutterside,

small-squeaks slip and twist.

A clumped complain
of attar and fleas

flocks bespeaking,
beaking curb-dust.
Brisk

aggression/ subtraction / air-puff

feather balls;
bellying and fluffed.

Song is speech
of the dirt, etz-tze,
bursts of birds

off-side pecks at each,

chirrs the je
tz tze it.

Implacable alertness
poetic realism
feathery thinking.

This is the practice, chirp.

It will test your last nerve.

9
•

These words swerve low to the ground.

Syntaxes peck and poke

swooping at implication
of incantatory information,

veering energy, with today

made declarative. It’s

anything that sees anything

seething inside polyphony:

ist JETZTZEIT.
Nu? The now-what of Now-Time.

May-June 2020

10
Dream Poem

to my friend who dislikes this genre

1.

I had to drive, but I don’t drive now

vvvsituation situation I was already
ooooooooo. the situation,
The road too large Why?

it was me indexical of
intersections, GPS voice, the liminal shunt.
I went and want and could hardly see as if I
see at all when I pulled into what

looked like a car wash but a hospital

or something like that and along those lines
and there was a therapist, with whom
of course I jousted, I was the expert

too, would not concede, and yet I could

not drive was as as (if) paralyzed, and so
I had to stop, was relieved that I’d
slipped had but I also had to pick there’s

This dream was up to no good.

up the daughter, did I have no way
cell phone, bu t
the therapist threw out some ideas pointing to

the situation. What was it? what subject?

Here were wizened-soon
women, me and me and me, scattered
among the dramatis the waiters PERSONAE hmm, mm,

I had no time to spare, time collapsed

11
distance hmmm w and one was an artist. I
I was afraid , and yet I had to drive,
no matter what. “Prepare to turn in 500 meters.”

And so the dream was, did I know

the situation? or not? This is
why Empedocles jumped into Etna
it said, but why was that?

2.
A kind of poetry thinking too "poetically," except it really was “like this”
I say mustering myself, and
So that’s your excuse says my voice---as “poetic realism”? I can’t even.

with gaps rooted

though what landscape would that
be, Gaps. . . . .Rooted ? Impossible
such "unreality"

in reality

demands something really to realize.

Although the language of black-outs and strike overs

has to be very clear. Even mannered.

What was that shadow hanging below the higher air?

Black matter edged with blue. It looks like my life is what.

And unreality in dreams? Name of the game. My friend—

was he correct about dream poems? I’d hate that, but maybe he is.

Plus what do I know about philosophy, damaged texts, volcanoes?

Where did I think I was going?
Or not. I mean, going
at all.

August-October 2019, March-April 2020

12
Cosmos, a Nocturne

1.
I began this far away
down-where
before dawn
in a night saturated
with pitiless derangements—
part dreamed, part head-blood,
part galloping times,
capital letter concepts
arranged in categories
then scrambled, intercut
spilling counterpart ides.
ILLJUSTNEST
ECO-EATH
DISUST
NOXXUS
ASTERAGE
ONWRECK.
Every abstract noun
an inchoate block
that, struck like a rock,
gushed
a water choke,
ready at any odd cell-small
no-sleep-image-anger
to cover the world
with mud.

Not dreams, not nightmares:

It’s sludge of political failure.
Systemic ruptures, looms of dooms on earth.

Yet the quiet gate stayed open,

the slide into sleep had seemed assured.
It was no help being
rebar-rigid with rage,
13
no particular sense to pit
extreme heat
caged children
bottled water litter’s microbits
against sleep.
Yet these things burst,
flooded over, further embittering
other unstoppable tides.

2.
It seems I have no skin,
am hungry ghost to haunt the stormed-on streets,
wading in elements so engulfing and poisonous
I am about to die again.

3.
The merger of two black holes forms
one binary black hole—is this really a thing?
did I say it right?
The person lying flat in awe and fear is
not quite sure
what this entails
except black holes are rare,
and somewhere there.

Implosive anti-matter stuff?

The inside out of cosmos outside in?
A heavy dot with which to rebegin?
Galactic collision between long-zone
bi-fold double swooshing light-year slough?
Although the person seems secure
that she is / I am here
implacable as astrophysics,
though not so impressive
nor as long-term,
withal the double question
does this count?

14
Does it matter being here?

4.
Can this cosmos be trusted
with a list of words,
daily simples,
nothing abstract
like WILL or JUSTICE, can it
be trusted to accept that
nouns (like “home” or “night”)
are invested with our feelings?
Say: the touch
of that particular door,
its key to jiggle in a certain way,
then a little kick; you’re home.
The light flickers
the leaves get shadowy luminous
endarkened colors shine.

The moon is up.

The door is shut.
The night is full.
The world is clear.

Can the cosmos bear

my pitcher in the shape of a rooster—
flowery, charming, and (it turned out)
impractical; can it dare
the word “mother”
without evoking
something mendable;
can it share our bread.

Does the cosmos

care to understand
house, bread, pitcher, night, door?

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5.
Yet ferocious mismanagement ensues
(a series of if-then clauses follows
involving plastics
and electronic waste, generating
profit, disordering the drinkable, fracking
plasma fields of cosmic blood)
from which a flood
of moral suffering rises above
last night’s crest.

What is to be done?
What could or should we do?
To live in our world, is what I mean.

And is it relief or infinite sadness to think

that this will be destroyed,
whether we (insomniac mites)
do it, or approve, or not?
Will be absorbed and be transformed
in the long-term normal course of things
no matter whether we wake tomorrow
or stay awake till light, to say
“pitcher, door, house, bread, night.”

6.
Glints of cosmic greenglass pierce our rocks
(blackglass! azure arrivals! jewels of song!)
all from drifts of dust.

It’s cosmic dust.

These matter-swirling beauties generate
our astonished empathy, considering
that all this
is innumerable grasps and gasps of cells
and minerals hooked into each other’s processes
where chancy atoms frisk and frost
setting night and day in motion

16
 where we can see their turns.
Does it matter that we can?
We see them now.

This place, these multiples, this time

barely countable, barely accountable
with the numbers we possess—
it’s an unfixed archive, a trace,
a draft, a drift in the knowable,
neither all omnivorous
nor all complete
but present as colors, mixed
and metamorphic,
just like that.

Crystals of small light fall from a compromised sky.

And once you know what you must face,
you try to wake.

April-November 2018

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Adventures of the book

Before the book is the abyss of writing.

It is a long space, it is a downward with various leaps,
it is unreadsonable air,
where maybe something… Not sure.

•
Closer in front are the failures of the writer
listed so exactingly
in minute penmanship
that the catalogue,
read and reannotated every day,
might actually become
the beginning of the written book.

What a droll surprise. If I’ve got

that adjective right.

•
During the book is the invention of writing.
During the book,
the invention of writing
might be subject to the same processes
already mentioned.

•
So do not “hold your own,” but hold another hole
of plural open owns in which we
only semble lone.

•
The book, the book of changes
the growth of the book.
Unwieldy too, an adolescent growth spurt
wherein there is a passel of yelling.

18
•
Try a rhythm of calmly breathing the book.
Care of self, care of book.
That’s nice, dear.
Thereupon someone grabs and dumps a bunch of it
by the side of the road—I mean into the compost—
and drives away.
It’s gone, anyway.

•
Here is a moment to imagine dividing the book from itself
because every book is as divided as sky from sea
or firmaments at night and day
or land from itself
as rocks and fields and
multiple manifests.
There are also unnoticeable transitions.
Dawny nuances. Underspaces.

•
The gaps and fissures that remain
create the textures of the book.
Seeded or rhizomed randomly with grass
that pulses slowly with the person’s reading.

Some will never notice

where the landslide
dislodged, roared down,
made barren parts
and even covered thick the road
with dirt and rock
before was bulldozed off
into the ravine around the corner
from that abyss.

But authors know there’s always patchiness.

•
The naming of the book

19
almost requires another book.

•
An even book should have odd chapters.
An odd book should have even chapters.
Never have two evens.
But please do break these rules.

•
Any book is vast and little./ It will rhyme with mast and tittle.

•
To name the entitlement
is never what’s exactly meant
because no matter, never riven never rent
will satisfy.
That “other book” is never spent.

•
This is the under the line book,
and another book, to take this literally,
on the other side,
the book of gloss,
lost gloss, or in invisible ink
or in tiny black phonemes taken in a gulp
swallowed down
and sometimes coughed up awkwardly.

Sentences ignored,
fragments lined up and forgotten.
Gloss is a ghost lost.

•
Also a book that lurks, was never done.
Was never begun.

•
Some words in any book
do not line up with the rest

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but fling themselves twirl
blissing out
a-swoop
tuned into eighteen points of numerology,
each of which promises life.

•
Other words now, stunned
by escapade,
manifest electric desires
and fill up with more longing
thereupon to drift and loop
more-now-awhile and
to incite (incur?)
more drift and swoop and not
whatever other books display as “form.”

•
Must there be a scheme? an almanac?
There needs to be some almanac, probably,
but only because a book first tries
to schedule completion
before it decides it’d rather not.
That would then be a calendar, just another
time mode prior to almanac (which mentions more firmly
what to do when, or what might be
a list).
But there need not be a scheme
of any sort
but Sort, and sorts and sorting them
the ways that are their wills.

•
I wanted to write a book.
Inside were many patterned words.
I let the words demand their shape, and yes,
they did.
Astonished me, for many a-many word stood up.
strikingly exigent

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 inside the make of time.

What happened then-- not mine to tell.

June 2018-August 2018; August 2020

22
Poetic Realism

1.
I began this in a driving snowstorm
so I couldn’t see the reality of things.
Or was the white-foggy danger in front of this poem
actually the reality of things.
The idea of
making elegies for unwritten poems—
I attribute to the 8 inches already fallen
and being faced with sodden home-time.

Effaced means just that. Who knew

what she then looked like. Who
knew her thoughts, ending?
I couldn’t see out, since both outside and in
had shadows and crystals
of lumped up shapes.

I couldn’t see in me, either.

“What” is a pronoun, like he, she,
it, they, we and “I,”
each with tracks of all of them
inside each, pocketed and stamped
on various organs, memories

and arteries, some kind of blood type

living off the viral air of each
and brought to each via
pipelines, nets and statements of hope,
exchanges and extrusions, splaying
thru a dramatic group
of colorful supernumeraries.

Really? Does “what” count

to substitute for a noun?
For all nouns, for all unknowns?
Including “I”?
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2.
So now: begin today, to date, total,
will this be the day, May 14, 2018,

of the beginning of the end of the world?

or even of the current world?

Generally, it’s two decades into any century

when the character of the whole begins to be defined

or freezes or gets wrapped like death or sweats

some strait-jacket mummy shroud that the rest of the decades

spend all their collective energy

untying the tabs, chains, bindings, and unreachable buckles of.

Is May 14, 2018 going to be this day?

Circa, give or take
a few days? Or, you know, years.
I am haunted by these further future days.

How can I make a book of future days,

of days within more days and of oblique silences?
What have I come to this portal
to tell you?

3.
And now, both days are now the past.
And now, another day.
What is “today’s haunt”?
Can it be written?

In transit
flat packed sand-mud airports
are better for takeoff and landing
but flood easily.

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Another:
“lah” in Singapore being
situational, emphatic, not my idiom,
cozy and ironic at once.
Try it, lah.

Nothing like this says enough.

4.
I see storms coming
through this misted heat
through the foggy cold,
I saw but did not understand those days,
and other days I apprehended, not yet to be told.

2018-2019

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