Pierre Alferi, p.7
Fourth room. An interior too can be disseminated;
things within reach, lost, ruined, no longer say
anything. Be more precise. Are you looking for a new place,
or a full one? Would you rather live in, board, own,
or deposit? My room abroad, sublet, replayed the entire
history of real estate. Once chased away lares and penates
its aura had collapsed for the profit of use; use,
for property; and property, for the sheer profit—of investment.
But we’ve lived there together. You worried a lot
about these singular things, about their discrete series,
indices of a real place, outside the mind. Orange carpet,
kitchenette, toaster, garbage disposal, television. There were
plenty of unreadable books, of unnameable collections.
The ugliness of the furniture came from its perfect equivalence
to itself. There, antennas probed the space,
small telescopic sentences, articulated, pivoting.
Each of yours is an impasse, yet whose end is not visible
except by way of a detour: comma, period. Matte and soft
surfaces, modeled after a bath rug,
avoided reflections, rebounds, slippages.
Only the voices of ancient divas survived.
At least we enjoyed the absence of an echo. Words
resonated a good distance from one another. And days,
which did what they do best: sliding each one
carried by the equal rumor of those, still attached,
which will follow, then falling from the massicot, hesitating
briefly in the air, becoming opaque, suddenly weighing
without thickening, and settling, sized to their dimensions,
on the past days. Yet the pile did not rise,
its height is fictive, a line formed by points.
The fourth act is to let the room lie fallow
and to let fall atoms of dust. In the meantime
one soon rouses ghosts, who make connections.
things within reach, lost, ruined, no longer say
anything. Be more precise. Are you looking for a new place,
or a full one? Would you rather live in, board, own,
or deposit? My room abroad, sublet, replayed the entire
history of real estate. Once chased away lares and penates
its aura had collapsed for the profit of use; use,
for property; and property, for the sheer profit—of investment.
But we’ve lived there together. You worried a lot
about these singular things, about their discrete series,
indices of a real place, outside the mind. Orange carpet,
kitchenette, toaster, garbage disposal, television. There were
plenty of unreadable books, of unnameable collections.
The ugliness of the furniture came from its perfect equivalence
to itself. There, antennas probed the space,
small telescopic sentences, articulated, pivoting.
Each of yours is an impasse, yet whose end is not visible
except by way of a detour: comma, period. Matte and soft
surfaces, modeled after a bath rug,
avoided reflections, rebounds, slippages.
Only the voices of ancient divas survived.
At least we enjoyed the absence of an echo. Words
resonated a good distance from one another. And days,
which did what they do best: sliding each one
carried by the equal rumor of those, still attached,
which will follow, then falling from the massicot, hesitating
briefly in the air, becoming opaque, suddenly weighing
without thickening, and settling, sized to their dimensions,
on the past days. Yet the pile did not rise,
its height is fictive, a line formed by points.
The fourth act is to let the room lie fallow
and to let fall atoms of dust. In the meantime
one soon rouses ghosts, who make connections.