foliage and grace and a new

cup and saucer, a laugh and a

lip and a laid climb sudden

and at the same time

patient and staring and

too late and later        all this and not ordinary

noise and distance and even dust

spitting and perhaps washing

and polishing the lamp and the

cake and a sweet singing

trimming by length and

by doubling in the stem

and in starting       it

shuts and it lifts the six

and the seven, a glass

and a cousin, the bug and the

post, nearer and farther

a meadow, a stroke

astonishing

and difficult in mercy and in

medicine, a lining

and the shape, the cut

and slender joint, concentrating

the illusion and the illustration and soap

and silk for cleaning, readiness

and eyesight scatter and scattering

are guided and guided

away      old ladies and mild

colds, a sweetness and some of

that, a whole sight and a

little groan and sometime a collapse

and a sold hole, habitual and tyrannical and

clean and cleansing and sometime next best

nearest a pillar         a cause and no curve and a hat

and hurt, and courage and a clock

and matches and a swan, three

and more and no more

than three, a red thing and a

white thing, noon and moon

leadish

and nearly set in

I made this poem first by tabulating a Gertrude Stein text, ‘Objects,’ from her Tender Buttons, in a

spreadsheet. The spreadsheet’s functions were then used to locate mutually overlapping verbal

rhythms and syntactic repetitions. I manually arranged the resulting fragments in order to accentuate

the further correspondences they shared – but found repetition generates its own differences.

This poem is extracted from a set of 24.