Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

Blaze-mends in Gold

The kinds of things that encumbered,
To be clear that “happened”
That nations chose to make happen
That have had mythologies and outcomes
Are (can we say?) epic. Like
The epic itself, anything called big, or an epic,
or perhaps like endless tales of genealogy,
Numbers, to remind us of timelines,
Of memorable coagulates of all the
First Peoples, their animating stories,
Their interactive fables
for Names of intuited Power,
and frankly their righteous (but numbing)
Enumerations of items.
Like themselves.
Things broke, were broken, were
Deliberately destroyed. The epic
Doubled the difficulty
Of stating events to enhance, even to honor
wanton acts Of Murder and
of salvage. Or taking Savage salvage.
Or ritual gifts. Who placates Whom?
First Peoples meeting Second ones
who also call themselves
The First. Did it go well?
How did at least some survive?
the parts in another variation,
Smashed and mended.
Of epic shards to mend with golden glue,
Of compromise—your episode, my episode
melded into one.

Willing? Forced? Odd, that jagged seam?
Random and careful to have some logic,
Even pain, a co-Herence that nests some bonds
while suggesting others
alert to the terms of former epics.
Simply an object large and mended that has
Rethought principles of fascination or
consciousness of activity. Or minimal Rules.
When was first?
Was it ever? When over?
It uses golden glue and it joins these shards
and shreds and shrouds
As if a broken pottery gone smash, yet precious.
To fix. With half-breed trees slashed
for the adhesive of greengold growing glue
we bleed and mix from them.
Blazes are both trail marks and this gold of reassembling.
Altered pictures, reglued lines to become new lines
of trace and song.
Mending is emending.
A retrofitting of notion on notion,
A way of building
Golden repair that
Makes the Broken and the Imperfect
Ready for scrutiny.
To highlight repair
Accept its changes
Look at the variants of what happened with
The large scheme—any rectification is never
The same as
before
The heroics on another scale: rescue,
The happiness of saving, an old
Piece reminding you, your remembering
What it was.
Seeing the making. Tracking that facture
Moist with the past, liquid with shining,
Coming into new-made air.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis (1940—2026) was a poet, scholar/critic and collagist whose notable long poem The Complete Drafts was published by Coffee House Press (2025); it is conceptualized as an excessive and wide-ranging work of socio-poesis within an ethical aesthetics. In addition, CHAX Press brought out her Selected Poems 1980-2020 (2022). Her books of collage poems join texts—aphorism, ruminations, and meditative writing—with visual work in unique ensembles. Secular Ex Votos, Life in Handkerchiefs, NUMBERS, Churning the Ocean of Milk, and Graphic Novella interpret contemporary life with visual panache, textual documentary, and wit.

In her career as a poet-critic, DuPlessis wrote extensively on Objectivist poetry and poetics, gender, poetry and poetics, including a classic trilogy The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice; Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work; and Purple Passages, investigating the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx