In the Archives of the Humanly Possible:Two Rooms Marianne Boruch (bio) Audio —A scraping outside, house prep for painting, obsessive whatever sparrow cardinal wren (here, drink this drink this drink this), the sound of making and remaking. Tiny happenstance creature in the wall—hear that? Then reverse to a given, a routine: so many pencils on the move in life drawing class, urgent whish and waft, the sound of total attention. Tree branches in wind, Earth spinning, rivers rivering, a key in a lock, syncopation of thunder and lightning, the holy rumble of contemplatives for life, the 3:00 am chill, a dark prayerful repeatable, women convincing themselves, convincing themselves, growing old. Chant, white noise to fake an ocean. We winnow grief and relief into wiry couplets, lush stanzas, stories that fit the mind then vanish into supper, night, the next day, a just-in-time siren, the ambulance, each groan and whimper locked in steel and jostle, twenty blocks to go. Refrigerator hum, the icebox she still called it midcentury, low ringing in the ear, Keats walking through early morning streets reading his Nightingale aloud, then Whitman, hospital volunteer, 1864, listening to time itself while the wounded soldiers sleep. Say the poetry in everything is simple: a descending. You can hear it. Babies in tears, kids whining at the checkout for a sweet taste, a girl stroking a cat, the purr of pleasure (be gentle be gentle), adolescents in love with exquisite disdain, an off-hand flood of words then the cutting pause and pause to Jesus, do you believe that? Thrilling— ________ Thus overture, where even silence is sound. The long day settles, wears out. "To repeat is to make memorable," a pianist told me, a musical idea, a eureka moment I keep quoting. And tell, retell my treasured blip of story, someone else writing a—quartet? I breathed wow, what's that like? It's solving one little problem after another. A shrug the composer released out loud. "Thought collects in pools" says Wallace Stevens, my favorite repeatable claim of his. Because pools of thought can clear and cloud, regrettable, unstoppable; they have a sound track. A voice under and over racing ahead, held back for [End Page 53] the next chance to speak. You can't hear everything at once. Conversation is—what?—20, 30 percent not quite listening? You drift inward and out for context personal and distant, a perspective. Think that word ambulance, full of oxygen's hiss, frantic yeah, here, god no, look at me, we're fine, we're fine, the speeding cramped quarters, time in the freeze mode. I repeat: to repeat is to make memorable. Poetry's grief and relief might talk to each other early morning or at night for weeks or years. To recall is to blur into sepia the was and right now. And what's to come. ________ An old friend, Marea Gordett, once insisted that Emily Dickinson "rhymed" when she did not. That in Amherst's century and a half ago, the poet turned sideways, upside down, for whatever sort of joining. I'll never be fully sold on the notion, though most equation is irresistible. You blink, and blink again. How much doubles, layers up, compounds. Because time moves forward and in reverse, I regularly back into a ten-year-old me, watching my mother not yet my age in a photograph hold a bat, ready to swing. That moment I've ached to enter, walking right into the frame to rhyme my life with hers in some pre-birth netherworld. It's not that I like baseball, I'd tell her; my job is to wait two decades right here. The look she'd give me: that silence is huge. Mid-morning, 1930. Birdsong close, an owl confused by daylight, or a thrush too early, its late afternoon song anyway, kids shouting in the middle distance. Even now I hear such things though my family's eventual habit is go deaf, half the time saying excuse me, what? for years. … Which is the history of refrain, isn't it? And persistence. And longing. To rhyme my life with hers. Is it simply...