from The Complete Drafts

And memory, they say, is the “mother” of the muses.
And mother is the instruction not to speak,
to speak partly, to speak euphemisms,
or mesmerizing euhemerisms, to
speak half-deaf to the undertext, to never notice
wantings,
to swallow mourning
to swallow the burning over and over so
that tubes and lobes are scarred with
stig-matter.

Which in order to set forth
must be scattered
must be shattered
smashed against a wall, a door,
thrown against the inoperable sealed-up exit.

–Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The Complete Drafts, Vol. 1