Rebecca Wolff Biography

There is a curiosity that knows
I know

deathless ceiling of unknowing
...

I can play songs in my head
Yes I can perfectly replicate

(the) full-on
orchestral
every note
(when the lights / do down / in the city)
yet I cannot

compose, for example

and though when I was young I believed

that the fullness meant
I could recreate the sounds
I heard in my head with my mouth

I learned through painful iteration
painfully unsatisfactory

shameful the rendition

so partial
almost unrelated
the qualities are: note tone scale register vocality musicality
incapacity
painfully shy of representation
is there anyone?

who is a record player
...

Careening over the
highway in
my lightweight
Japanese
Death Star
buffeted by the great and powerful
winds

icy winds
of winter warming
cold air with hot air
under it

accordion pleats
of natural disaster
my disaster

in the past if you were to say to me

or to rage at me
in a poem
about America I would charge you
a great failure

to even use the word. It is
banality
this land is suffering because poets—

their great cohort—


I look twice
to save lives.
...

there are some things up there
uptown

I want to see

I want to see I'm going to look at that and see

I want to go up and see

that show. That show

I went to see, I went to see.

There are some things up

there uptown

I want to

look at that and see. I'm going to see

what I look. What I look at, when I look, vessel,

I stood to see. I went to stand to look

to see. Venturing further I went outside myself to look
at that wall. It fed! There was a box inside that was not blank, I saw it.
It was really different from an aura, the thing had

colors, the thing was talking

to itself. And spoke

to me, not incidentally.
...

Let's go out and buy something. In the sun.

No, let's stay home and make something, the sun floods the room. It
could be green, on paper. It could be money. That's the way to create
new matter.

That's how I detach boats from moorings—my boat, my mooring—
the harbor
shallow in low tide

skiff propelled over buffeting sands flats on

sheer
puissance.
...