strange correspondence seems to be as stimulus to the poet’s imagination.
However complex the time shifts and the “cassettes” where the visual track
from one time period is spliced with the verbal track of another, Tom’s as-
sumption is that Ed will understand what he is saying. And so the letter, one
of the most traditional literary forms, curiously enough becomes a perfect
vehicle for dense and oblique multivocal speculation. Even the ¤nal tale of
the long-ago open-heart operation, never directly witnessed but always on
the edge of Tom’s consciousness, can be told. And the addressee—whether
Ed or his double, the reader—is drawn into the poet’s circle by the consistent
discrimination of alterity, of difference between one moment or one reaction
and another. The epistolary anti-memoir thus manifests itself as a genre
with great possibilities. Yes, “the wheel turns full circle: but the ®aw in the
rim touches the ground each time in a different place” (22).
242 Chapter 12