Overheard: Does the sun still shine if everyone is living in a bunker underground? Translation is a process whereby words generate and decay. Me and my furry friends, anonymous plants and animals, purely penpals, are non-communicative readers communing with Lyn Hejinian’s “Rejection of Closure.” We’re caterpillaring spelunkers spending precious final days, hours, minutes, seconds, close listening to Anna via Alex dipping their wormwood-tipped pine needles in vegetable matter. Ears to the permafrost, hairs standing on end, hard-of-hearing, but this is hard to hear, and not for our ears, anyway. The ecosystem echoes their clandestine spylines. At high noon, they sneak into the pores of your skin and trip a sequence of sequences i.e. consequences. I now want to recognize (pre-cognize?) the Speaker of the House, distinguished member of the true shrew family, leader of the tiniest avant-garde, first mouse on the moon. For the Shrew by Anna Glazova trans. Alex Niemi (Zephyr Books, 2022).
