On A 510a Dickinson jotted down a recipe, the end of which has been lost beyond the tear. She may have torn the sheet away in order to isolate the fragments on the reverse side. The relationship between the two extrageneric fragments, A 509 and A 510, inscribed across one side of the manuscript and separated only by a horizontal pencil line, is unknown. Though no link beyond a material one has ever been established between them, it is nonetheless possible that the texts are connected in other ways. Dickinson used horizontal lines not only to mark the boundaries of discrete texts but also to separate the body of a poem from its variants and to mark internal textual divisions—stanza and line breaks, for example. Thus, A 509 and A 510, by themselves radically compressed yet autonomous lyric throes, may together constitute a new, hitherto unrecognized text, "A 509 / 510." Both A 509 and A 510 appear, separately, as traces in other texts. A 509 appears as a trace in five copies of the poem beginning, "We like March -" ("We like March - his"; "We like | March - his"; "We like March -"; "News is He"): as a variant trace (text altered) in a fair-copy of the poem (H 369) composed around 1871 (RWF) or 1872 (THJ) and sent to Susan Dickinson; as a trace (lineation and punctuation altered) in a later, intermediate-copy draft of the poem (A 508) composed around 1878 (THJ, RWF); again as a trace (lineation and punctuation altered) in two fair-copy drafts—A 511, Princeton—also both composed around 1878 (THJ, RWF); and, finally, as a trace (lineation altered) in a fair-copy of the final lines of the poem (A 786) signed "March" and possibly sent to Mabel Loomis Todd around 1883 (RWF). A 509, inscribed with a variant of the poem's last lines, may have been Dickinson's point of departure for the 1878 version of the poem. A 510 appears as a variant trace (text altered) in a rough-copy draft of the poem "The inundation of | the Spring" (H 338), composed in the 1870s (Smith and Hart), possibly in 1877 (THJ, RWF). In Poems (1998), R. W. Franklin indicates that A 510 was composed before H 338, but it is also possible that it was composed after the rough-copy poem-draft. It is inscribed in a hand that has at least some characteristics in common with Dickinson's fair-copy hand; moreover, it offers a new textual variant. A 509 and A 510 offer evidence of the affinity between fragments and variants: like the variant word choices rowing below so many of Dickinson's poems in the manuscript volumes, these late fragments, appearing, respectively, as traces in the concluding lines of the poems "We like March -" and "The inundation of | the Spring," suggest a crisis of and at the limits of texts. Unlike the variant word choices in the manuscript volumes, however, the late fragments appear outside the trace poems' gravitational fields; materially speaking, at least, they attain the status of radically compressed but independent texts.

The composition dates assigned by Thomas H. Johnson and R. W. Franklin to the texts in this constellation have interesting implications for a study of Dickinson's compositional process. Johnson and Franklin assign a composition date of "1877" to both A 510 and to the poem-draft in which A 510 appears as a trace. If, as seems likely given the arrangement of the lines on the page, A 509 and A 510 were composed at, or at least around, the same time, it would appear that A 509 was composed no less than five years after the first version of "We like March -" (1871 or 1872), in which it appears as a variant trace, and up to a year before the later versions of the poem, in which it appears as an exact trace. Thus, just as poems often evolve out of fragments, so they often break down into fragments again, after attaining, sometimes only briefly, a finished form. As both avant- and après-texts, such fragments may also attain the status of independent texts.