and more pieces (like a puzzle)

"The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning."
- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

*

We are happy in our way of life.
It doesn’t make much sense to others. We sit about,
Read, and are restless. Occasionally it becomes time
To lower the dark shade over it all.
Our entity pivots on a self-induced trance
Like sleep. Noiseless our living stops
And one strays as in a dream
Into those respectable purlieus where life is motionless and alive
To utter the few words one knows [...]

We need the tether
Of entering each other’s lives, eyes wide apart, crying.

- "Parergon" by John Ashbery

*

"When we apprehend the auditor’s mediating role, we have to reconnect the speaker’s main point (ergon) with what is beside the point (parergon), but the poem itself never confirms that our framing is accurate."
- Joseph A. Dupras on Browning's "My Last Duchess"

*

Collapsing, tethering, framing.
Beside the point.
(In both ways)