lence,” sets the stage for the poem’s paragrammatic activity. To be “read” is
inevitably to be sentenced: readers of prose process consecutive sentences—
but that demand (which this poet cannot ful¤ll) also becomes a kind of
death sentence. Furthermore, the text is “detached from equivalence”—from
equivalent line lengths, equivalent statements. And since there is no punc-
tuation, the “when, then” constructions become equivocal, clauses often
pointing both forward and back, as in “when there are cities I’m the colour
grey when there’s a national blaze.” Indeed, throughout the text, post hoc
is never quite propter hoc. Punning, moreover, regularly undermines the pos-
sibility of communication. “When the shadow lifts its box, I’m light,” for
example, plays on the gerund “shadowboxing” and perhaps, more speci¤-
cally, on the well-known Duke Ellington song “I’m Beginning to See the
Light,” which contains the stanza, “Used to wander in the park / Shadowbox-
ing in the dark, / Then you came and caused a spark, / That’s a four-alarm
¤re now.” That ¤re becomes, in line 5, a national blaze, and when that oc-
curs, then “I’m a bed of shared water.” Nice for putting out the ®ames, but
how does one share water? McCaffery’s mode, as line 8 puts it, is one of sus-
pension: “I repeat a word before the next word has a meaning.” Thus, “sen-
tenced and detached from equivalence,” the text must fend for itself. If the
“aenigma” of the title is never resolved, textuality nevertheless forces itself
on the reader: “when i am eaten in the answer I am still proposed.”
Note that this last line is the only one that fails to meet the justi¤ed right
margin, calling the reader’s attention to the proposal. McCaffery’s “Aenigma”
thus enacts its meanings visually, concretely, even though it looks like an
ordinary prose paragraph. Typography, we see, has come a long way in de-
constructing the categories “prose”/“verse.”
A somewhat different “Galaxial” prose is that of Joan Retallack in a piece
from her book How to Do Things with Words called “Narrative as memento
mori”:^30
At breakfast in the Ramada Inn Paul
needed to test the procedure for de
veloping a photogram. (He does not
wish to call it a Rayograph for pol
itical reasons.) Doug ordered 2 egg
s sunnyside up with ham. I ordered
Special K and a banana. Paul ordere
d French toast and began the photog
ram placing a blue rectangular piec
e of sensitive paper on his noteboode Campos’s Galáxias and After 189