An End, if Not The, to One Million Footnotes

Tonight, I powered through the creation of a handful of footnotes at my One Million Footnotes blog, a project that has been in development since 2004. That brings me to the point of an end of sorts, because I decided, years ago, that when I had written three thousand of these, I would extract them from the blog and make a book out of them.

When I originally conceived of One Million Footnotes, I had meant it to be a daily project, though even at a tiny numbered prosaic ("of prose") poem a day I would never reach one million. Strangely, the number isn't even a goal, and certainly not a reasonable one. The poems are fragmentary observations (some of reality, some totally of the imagination) pulled out of the narrative of a life no-one ever sees because no-one ever lives is. These are the fragments left as footnotes in a giant conceptual narrative that does not exist. All that's left of the story are these notes, which are conceived of as those pieces of information interesting to know but not important enough to put in the general stream of that narrative that does not exist.

Especially this year and last, as I was writing a long poem to a new person every day for 365 days, I allowed these footnotes to slip out of the grasp of my hands that write them. Even a tiny string of words sometimes seems like too much to try to do. But I now have three thousand of these things, another book's worth of poems to edit, another book I might never finish even though I have just finished it. I am a poet, not a finisher.

It has taken me more than eight years to write three thousand of these, so it's possible I might make it to ten thousand, if it were possible for me to live another seventeen or eighteen years, if it were possible for me not to become bored with these quotidian observations from the bottom of the page, observations that are sometimes humorous, usually not, sometimes clever, sometimes cryptic, sometimes real, sometimes imaginary, sometimes all that I can accomplish over the course of a long day.


One Million Footnotes: An Almost Random Selection from Each of Its Years

Monday, May 31, 2004
7.
Taking a cloth to wipe her brow, he rubbed her all away.


Sunday, October 16, 2005
739.
Language, he thought, as he considered his wife's leptodactylic hands, doesn't work well enough for us.


Monday, June 05, 2006
982.
Three men, then a man alone, and finally another emerged from the restroom with saffron sheets wrapped around their bodies and cornmeal yellow socks.


Tuesday, July 31, 2007
1481.
Every night he was away, he left her a note that he allowed anyone else to read.


Monday, September 22, 2008
2244.
He had devised exactly how to write each sentence but had forgotten the details before he had a chance to write it, so every sentence he wrote was a ghost of a sentence he never had come to write, a sentence whose birth was merely an imagining.


Wednesday, July 08, 2009
2542.
The last orange streetlight in a row of glowing orange streetlights was the moon, low and seeping through the trees.


Monday, January 25, 2010
2708.
The man or woman, the ghostly figure he saw cross the yard that night and so many nights, through their glass door as the television shone upon his face, he thought had to be the reflection of something that was crossing the screen of the television, yet there was never anything approximating that movement there, so he was left with the ghost, and the thought of the ghost, occasionally crossing his yard, from right to left, possibly all through the night, even as it disappeared each time half-way across the yard, which had become wet with the melted snow under the day's heavy rain.


Saturday, February 12, 2011
2930.
She read the paper, she washed the dishes, she put the dishes away, she put the dog, rickety and old, outside.

ecr. l'inf.