The Complete Drafts of Rachel Blau DuPlessis
A Restless Messengers Blog SymposiumReturn To Main Symposium Page
Draft 87: Trace Elements
by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
Quick, to the side. Look!
There
Was the trace.
But you missed it. (224)
An encyclopedia of trace. Trace. A hold/a hole of evanescence. Readable signage.
Among days, and works, there are always traces: The odd thing to the side. A chora before concept. A space without between. What your own child remembers from when she was small: an event that wasn’t even “there” for you.
What trace is found depends on your readiness.
The words have to tell us, if we pay attention: The phoneme shifted on the margin of edge. The mark erased. Painted over. Not neutral. Not ineffable. Always historical. Monumentality broken and scattered. Effaced text, the darkened page, what someone blackened out.
As it is every day as we work through Drafts: The trace and its undertones emerge as small largeness, and subtext flips to text. (Nothing is minor.)
It is impossible to “finalize” trace.
But trace is a poetics.
That’s one thing one could say. (237)
A poetics: The Poetics of the trace is like the Imaginary Museum of the Sardine. The sardine is prolific and nourishes and lives, they say, in every ocean upon earth. Trace elements function like poetry made by standing where you are…waiting for the twist or quirk to coalesce and signify and turn and disappear. Not so much the world in a grain of sand but the grain of sand in the world defines trace. Not to express the unexpressible but to unexpress the expressible.
♢
Because everything may have meaning
every mark, dot, swirl and particular color
indicate steps to the hidden water, to the story
of that water, to its ancestral land form maker,
trace is inscribed everywhere
and the world is trace,
but without the reader.
Without the reader, without translation,
without the listener, without decoder—
Nothing. (240)
As writer, as reader, there’s the question: Array fanned out but not assembled. Small almost invisible urgencies, but how to put them together?
DuPlessis’s advice, to us, to herself, as collage, as praxis: Illuminate the breakage. Gather and respect the webs of residue, from which we make both system and singularity, we make sensation that resists a system. Let the shard become readable by jaggedness and by piecing.
♢
Nothing beside remains, and
nothing
beside remains: a grammatical
shift from verb to noun
might be the point. (229)
And here the Shoah moving like a continent beneath the unsettled: For traces caused by enormous historical crimes one thinks, unthinks, and thinks again. Molecules remain in air. We breathe each other in. This is not consolation. In the world’s greatest age, the Age of Ash we are the alloy of. The names that cannot rise, the dead and their graffiti. Call them. Call them.
Trace is evidence. It is a blurry mark of what we should have known, and almost did.
♢
So the trace is exigent,
even if almost obliterated,
even if we know it only
as something on the verge
of its own disappearance,
the trace is exigent.
It has demanded
at least this. (243)
Beyond the poetics of trace, among the brokens and the readers, is us. Abandoned among detritus in a plundered world, we are the traces we seek. We are our other otherness, and others are (in part) ourselves. Nomadic smallness in the workshop of abyss. Must fail, must fail as a practice, yet must accept this with the fullness of being. Then self becomes the trace and knows the trace thereby.
NOTES:
All text not in italics is drawn from Draft 87 of Drafts, Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Coffee House Press, 2025, Vol. 2). “Trace. A hold/a hold…signage,” 216. “The odd thing to the side…between,” 216. “What your child remembers…‘there’ for you,” 221. “What trace is found…readiness,” 223. “The phoneme shifted…edge,” 223. The mark erased…historical,” 222. “Monumentality...scattered,” 227. “Effaced text…blackened out,” 223. “The trace and its undertones…flips to text,” 224. “Nothing is minor,” 232. The Imaginary Museum of the Sardine, 234, note 455. “…trace elements function…turn and disappear,” 231. “Not so much the world…the expressible,” 227. “Array fanned out…put them together?” 228. “Illuminate the breakage…residue,” 228-229. “from which we make…that resists a system,” 239. “Let the shard…by piecing,” 241. “For traces caused by…Call them.” 235. “Trace is evidence…almost did,” 236. “Abandoned among detritus…the trace thereby,” 239.
Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. is a poet, translator, critic, and corporate consultant. Poetry collections include After the Operation (Four Way Books 2025), Salient (New Directions 2020) and Series | India (Four Way Books, 2015). Her translations from classical and contemporary Persian include Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, poems of Forough Farrokhzad (New Directions 2022, Finalist for the PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation 2023) and The Green Sea of Heaven: Eighty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz: 30th Anniversary Edition (Monkfish Publishing 2024). She was the founding CEO/Managing Partner of Conflict Management, Inc. and Alliance Management Partners, boutique corporate consulting firms.