For Tate, this does not suggest chaos, but rather that he must be engaged in a continual revisionary process, as in “The Horseshoe.” It begins with the speaker examining an old scrapbook:

Eventually he stumbles across “the heart-rending detail / of the horseshoe found propped against the windowsill.” And it is precisely the details, or more correctly the “Years of toil to find the right angle,” the right perspective to see the details, that becomes most crucial. And yet each detail also “sinks” away and the meanings, the pencilings, go under erasure, as Derrida says, or into a system of double writing:

Finally, the poet’s reading the past becomes, like his shaving which is so casually introduced, a way of scraping the past away to write it anew:

In the end, the poet’s strategy is revealed as a way of discovering a self, a history, a record of the self’s struggles to read and rewrite a past. The moment, the poem, becomes one of continual interruptions, “a constellation / of my own bewilderment,” the record of unravelings, of life “in the heart of the periphery.”

How, then, does the poet begin in the midst of all these unravelings, where everything is always already a rewriting? For Tate, the poetic act includes an act of recovery that involves a desire to understand how the past is “constantly pressing on the present” and also to understand how the future, as a sort of “destiny,” leans at the same time back on that present. The focus is always on the elusive present, the moment where there is “everything / at stake for that instant, and not on some simple nostalgia for the past nor a wistful hope for the future. Tate’s is a poetry at once attached to and detached from larger structures of understanding, larger contexts of time, at once filling and emptying its moments, voiced and anonymous —

Just how unsettled and precarious the poetic moment is in Tate, how bleak the “wounds” against which its style struggles, how intense the “homing instinct” is, becomes apparent in two poems from Constant Defender. “Tell ThemWas Here” narrates the journey of the speaker back to an ancestral home where, he finds, “no one was home.” And so he begins to brood —

Rumors, whispers, the myths of the unsubstantial, these images that haunt Constant Defender, and to some extent the earlier work, are all the self has to go on. In response, the narrator, as poet, can only inscribe his name:

The signature — “Green” — possibility — scratched out, written over — a double writing — the identity of the self is given in the very process of attempting to write, to discover (even by covering, scratching over, and uncovering) the self as something more than a reference to the fixed past of “unreliable ancestors.” The self becomes whoever who writes in this active, dynamic sense.