Embedded Files
How
Apart from Borges, if anyone could know times scales, their interference
and how they might combine in a written artifact, it is J.H. Prynne.
In perpetual memory.
In which a falling raindrop went
to a work-in-progress.
A normal raindrop expired, delayed the cheek
of him who is shot incrementally.
A person arrested in 1939
being written as “a person is arrested in 1939” or
“In 1939 a person is arrested” invalidated.
Disbelief
is flickering softly. If exclusive of probabilism,
of flash
chronoconception
sent 1939, Now carries its own stop-action
to a work in progress.
A raindrop’s contingent
refrain is now coincident with a gunshot.
Coincidently, someone returns an atlas to a library.
***
Once upon a time it was 1939
plausibly. And with it there came historically-vetted
people, places and things. Penultimate
stay then wished for
play, then execution.
Once upon a time a play-within-a-play
tangent to exit
doubling
a fundamental outing itself,
Claudius vetted as Claudius. Jacques Roubaud opens as many
as four parentheses, exacting sacrifice. In memory (of).
***
And it came to pass that it was 1939,
almost unanimously. So that nothing be explained.
And it came to pass that a character lived
And so I took it apart.
Probabilistic irrational worlds may summon causality
at whim. And it came about.
And anticipation oscillated an ordeal
overwhelmed; alive and inert, the days were spoken for.
A plot type in an offhand manner.
Opponents are non-plussed.
And it came to pass
that misfortune was generative and genial
and gave all to the achievement, of incompleteness
the sought-for person.
***
Wait a minute, just a sec post-analytic whir
reel, spinning swivel vertiginous library
clockwise, counterclockwise, stirring nightmare
beloved.
Ending: endgame specialist strategic thinker
prospers in great ready and set
to your finale within reach: taste its anachronies
belonging
to thought. To obey and so to conclude
chronology, lay a colleague to rest, be, take a breath
with respect to the present hand
dealt.
***
An instant has no value.
Two instants have no value
The progress from one instant to another?
An instant has no value. So endeth the first reading.
But on second thought…, revision
causing empirical time to listen
to reap seasonally, pulverized in our treelessness.
Parenthetically and far-fetched is eventful
sequential meltdown. Authorial
magnet. Closed parenthesis.
***
Story, plot. Someone has said the next
historical fact, that fact already supersaturated, wet
with eventfulness, insistent.
Someone has said the next historical fact
emits an execution between instants’
formulating rules for
strikes to become the score, which is to say, sound
And from a rowboat thunderstorms are seized. As the din
also diminished
resources: a raindrop.
A raindrop translated from the ----------- innumerable times
Retardations staircase-like
trying to find out.
Someone created these cinders
flowering
fabula without particular privilege.
***
And it is 1939.
And a person named is under arrest.
And anticipating execution
and wishing for a stay;
and the stay is granted.
And the person is executed.
***
And the fiction asserts that the year is 1939
And that a particular persona is arrested
a halt to action even as a halt attests
to the story’s advantage.
And anticipating execution
ardently wishing for a stay
is a poetic function.
And the stay is granted to dilate the act halted
to improvise the persona in detour
and delay, and in being detained;
and the story dilating even to a work-in progress, halted,
to be continued and to end.
And so to the story’s improvement.
And stay and story and plot end at once.
And the person is executed
as a raindrop falls
wending its way.
Marjorie Welish is the author of several books of poetry, limited-edition constructed artist’s books, and a book of art criticism. Isle of the Signatories (2008) came about thanks to a Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellowship of Cambridge University, 2004-5; other recent books of poetry are In the Futurity Lounge /Asylum for Indeterminacy (2012), So What So That (2016), and A Complex Sentence (2021) – all from Coffee House Press. Her book of art criticism is Signifying Art: Essays on art since 1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1999); she is also a contributor to The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1998), and has written art criticism for popular magazines such as Art in America and Art Monthly (U.K.) as well as for scholarly journals, such as Partisan Review, Salmagundi and Textual Practice (U.K.). Fellowships include: Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 2014-15; St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, Visiting Fellow – granted for 2014-15; others: Fulbright Senior Specialist Roster, 2006-11 –Spring 2010 (Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland); grantee, and Spring 2007 (University of Frankfurt, Germany). Her creative arts and criticism were the subjects of recent day-long conference at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, resulting in a 300-page conference book. Her visual arts practice recently exhibited include Academy of Arts and Letters, Invitational, 2018, de/cipher, first edition: Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung [Society for Art and Design], Bonn, DE; second edition: Arti et Amicitiae [For Art and Friendship], Amsterdam (2023-24), and the solos Of the Sign, The Flow Chart Foundation, Hudson, New York (2023-24), and Grating, Gradient, and Then Some, Jesus College in the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. (2024) Panel April 24: with Jean Khalfa, Rod Mengham and Drew Milne. In February 2024, Artforum published a ten-page portfolio of her art.
Copyright © 2026 by Marjorie Welish, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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