Repetitions and Traces by Ruth Roach Pierson
How easily trepidations and passions become,
over a lifetime, obsessions, repeating
like Ohrwürme or, rather, the leitmotifs
of Wagnerian operas
Schubert sonatas
Whittaker halobacteria – such
iterations
and reiterations assuming the form
not of carbon copies, more like inscriptions
on the carbon scrolls of fax machines –
jingles and advert slogans, a kind of pre-
internet spam, interpolated among
the messages senders intended
all interlaced into a ghostly
tracery of words like the faint,
sometimes blurred, often almost
fully erased residues of us
others may retain after we
have returned to carbon.