asemic dub-so Mark Scroggins subtitles Zion Offramp 51-100. Asemic language wants to say the unsayable, can't be deciphered with any certainty. The reader can only wonder, imagine, examine the choices the text proposes. To dub is to echo, to alter, to name, to arm. asemic dub, then. To name or imagine into being? To echo or rework, remake what happens? To arm the word, to make it mean? To baptize with language-is that substance or spirit? Scroggins is a Deacon of the heretical faith we call the world, a celebrant of its arcane and familiar particulars, its heart- sunk, guarded privacies. "Deacon" from the Greek, meaning servant, messenger, minister. On his altar lie all the world's tales and trash, its wounds and laws, lullabies and betrayals, plagues, pleasures, prophecies, memories, original sins, mutable histories, breathtaking weather, vagrant blossoms, birds and insects, secrets in flames ... ruining the work of time. Ruining time itself, it seems, till we are utterly here. Only, where is here? Scroggins shows us how, though we are lost, benighted knights, we can read, think and feel our way along. And we can sing. The words step forward, upright and healthy: / puella, girl; agricola, farmer; filia, / daughter. Simple, musical, sensuous. I want to say, real. But not simple, not really. Language like a subtle complex / tapestry Morris Persian labyrinthine daedalian. Deacon Scroggins reminds us that words have the power to suffer for us, to bless and redeem us. What has been spoken in darkness / shall be published in the light. Strangely, the book seems not to end, not because Scroggins has promised a third volume of Zion Offramp, but because the poem feels magically contiguous with the world. It just keeps going. Something happened, something is happening, something may happen next, a giant story / that tells all the stories the book / didn't tell. An endless book, spilling / over, the mysterious, recurring girl in her room ... already a woman ... passing under the Bridge of Sighs. -Billie Chernicoff
