Remembrances almost live,” all history at once,” itself alienated from cause effect.” Makes several centuries “simultaneously present,” while revealing a causal narrative in a sequence of construction, decomposition, renovation, deterioration epochs distributed across ruinscape; on the other hand, construction episodes, one after another tension between succession and simultaneity.
Sơn Mỹ 1969 letter to 1904 genocide, as dress rehearsal for happened to Jews.” Historical atrocity latent within the earlier event, which set stage for its unfolding years later. Two events, successive in a particular way, also simultaneous, later embedded in earlier. A spatial image of history something like Smithson’s “straight line” of global cities, from ancient Rome to modern Passaic to contemporary Nice as an older city is a “three-dimensional mirror…reflect[s]” a later city “into existence,” at once incubates and precipitates what follows succession and simultaneity.
in [certain] part[s] of Beslan or Baghlan, years after war’s end [that] ha[ve] not been rebuilt” yet “it is fairly easy to establish some continuous connections” between interaction and “the dreams and drawings of someone else.”
~
Questions, which defamiliarize conventional hearts, much-studied. Develop original model for apprehending past want, more significant than previous acknowledged. Derives from a particularly grim period in the siege, “the daily handling of corpses” and other -time activities take a toll on “Pain, nostalgia, her, eyes, he, I. The positive comfort in knowing the sun progress toward dust, as does we, as does a garage, the ghost, reason, analogy, nerves, fingernails. The same as my own, and by extension, the jittering leaves around us “reason by analogy” drawing a composite of wreckage cosmological, prehistorical, and industrial style evident in the earlier age of analogy between “Builders” and the other, (half-men), a certain impression of the social – “Ruts that constitute prehistorical cart tracks “represents centuries of human activity,”: time is calcified there, yet not arrested. Decomposing permafrost.
~
Disappears into the waves, into the street, near the sea steps inexplicably took his hand and began to run buildings in part of years after war’s end had not been rebuilt. The street” ambling the autumn of soldiers preparing for war since Suez crisis overflowed a choppy sea of green Commando berets, laced with white and blue naval uniforms nearby
a newspaper kiosk, red scare headlines – “urban palimpsest:” interplay of ruin and repair—bombed-out buildings on “level and clear” street—friction between one historical epoch and another, disclosing both passage of time and temporal stasis, buildings lodged in 1943, as environs, street to city advanced to 2017 emerge, depicts devastation of War discusses a five-thousand-year-old wreck, a megalith temple complex. Situating enables build logic of ruin, formal structure.
~
A kind of unreliable narrator meticulous; obsessive administration repeatedly keeping file, world dependent, complete insofar as this chronicle dependence on survivors disorders by the in, the of, and which. Progeny need those crimes not committed. Further file keeping a potentially illusory appearance that the quest led chronicles is manageable, and “domination through knowledge” the legacy case implicitly in a position doesn’t aim understanding, but simply, knowledge.
~
—
Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020) and Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books, 2015), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha. He is the editor of the forthcoming anthology Divine Orphans of the Poetic Project (1913 Press), and his work has appeared in Fence, Boston Review, APR, Volt, Lana Turner, Iowa Review, and elsewhere.