ward from the right margin, suspends time. The suspension sets, is set, in
type, in columns that precipitate false memories of garden, vineyard, trel-
lis.”^28
Thus, in this particular passage, the characters per line vary between 45
(line 1) and 53 (line 4). The wider spacing given to certain words like con-
ciliatory emphasizes their phonemic and visual relationship to other words,
in this case ciliary (of an eyelash) in the sixth line and cylinder in the eighth.
The spacing of line 8 (it has only 47 characters), moreover, creates the very
“hollow space” that is its reference point, and the reader’s eye is inevitably
drawn to the words “Only language grows” that follow and that have no
words beneath them on the page. There is only the “grass-green grass” on the
left. And that grass points back to grows so as to create a “galaxy” on this
lawn of excluded middle.
A second example of a prose block that is attentive to the right-hand mar-
gin is Steve McCaffery’s “Aenigma”:^29
when i am read i am sentenced and detached from
equivalence when the shadow lifts its box i’m light when
my ¤ngers turn to foreheads i’m an eagle’s heart instructing
scorpions to dance when they are cities i’m the colour grey
when there’s a national blaze i am a bed of shared water
wherever i am tempted by precision i become a wrinkle elsewhere
if they modify my centre i repeat a word before the next
word has a meaning should my voice be grafted to a question
then the third persona will replace a cardboard cover if i tell
myself these possibilities i tell myself a canvas has subsided so
that when i am eaten in the answer i am still proposed.The key phrase in this twelve-line composition is “I am” (used twice in the
¤rst line and twice in the last), the “Aenigma” (archaically spelled) of the
title being “what am I?” The answer depends upon adverbs of time and
place: direct at dead center, we see the phrase “wherever I am,” and the ref-
erence to “elsewhere” right beneath it follows hard upon ¤ve instances of
“when.” “My centre,” “my voice,” “if I tell myself,” “I tell myself ”: self-
reference is foregrounded throughout the piece. And yet this is the least per-
sonal of poems, an “exterior monologue,” as Haroldo would call it, in which
“language autoenunciates itself.” Indeed, the ubiquitous “I” is not a particu-
lar individual but a function of the larger language game.
The opening, “When I am read I am sentenced and detached from equiva-
188 Chapter 9