1.
Means by which they spoke
Being as a point of passing
Pockets of air convulse
At the water's edge
Bloom and dome depressing
Looped in continuous motion
Divided from one
The jaw and inner ear
Fluid now fused
Head turned sideways to the ground
And sound as matter
Objects and communication
As though of time before
Existence ahead
Of heat and palms flexing
Basics combined
Of fictive purpose
Place and circle
Connect with a regular surface
2.
The doorstep had been taken out like a tooth.
Under the back porch
Visible at the edge
Membrane
reinforcing
To stabilize
The finished walls and floors inside
And layered between the house and the ground
What homes are made of
Reworked and refilled
The non-things, silent, unnamed
A vessel like all things
Space holding matter.
3.
Panning for […]
The shake sideways of a sieve
This action separates and reveals.
The movement of a house
Holes formed by inhabitation,
Feeding,
Evacuate
A mound of flour
done, undone
A partial recession
Unspoken notes grinding,
tightly folded
ring of bone
I open wide my jaw to release and hold to hear
the tear of compacted, compressed bone like the
creak of the staircase,
Sliding underfoot and smell of oiled wood,
in the house where the willow roots were tunnelling.
4.
The reservoir had run dry.
I stared into the filter as the water channelled down, bright spot getting smaller, as it bled through the grounds. Counting and intricately watching as it disappeared.
A hole had been dug and filled with the fronting tide. As the tide bows back, the moisture gradually recedes to a smooth polished basin.
The colour spread, I watched it creep, and ink blot turning human. Stretches, gathering form until it slows to recognition. Bearing resemblance, shining with the perceiving eye.
Gushing quickens to a broad outline.
Eyes fixed on the plaster to see if a mark filters through fibres.
Carry the absorbing of a changing body.
The colour runs through.
I get up and press my hands to the floor. You are not there, but the sound continues, a drip like a shuffle, or the stretch of the boards, the material coming away, breaking away, the yielding timbers, creeping in infinitesimal measures. I press my hands to the floor, to the sill, to the glass, to the night, to feel the murmur of the shrinking back, the separating.
Drawing back the curtain. I feel the wet heaviness, full in my hand on the vertical drop, fan out to see it seeped into a diamond. I look up to droplets forming on the cornice and falling. I pull the curtain out to catch them and dull the sound, they spread into the weave, melted snowfall down, a pale stain on white above.
The other side. A reservoir above. Making itself a different shape to pass through. Regathering as a mark not a body, a flat shape stored and bleeding through the over and under.
To blend into the floor, to blur the edges as travelling through a surface.
Lay down flat waiting to be drawn through.
5.
The day before, I had begun making candles.
A set liquid, poured and contained inside a mould of corrugated cardboard, bent according to the places where it chose to yield, folding between tubes of air to create irregular, triangular columns, sealed with hot glue and into which melted wax poured, in pastel shades of peach and pale green, opaque layers ossified around a core string which ran through it, connecting the base and the air.
Liquid wax seeped unruly from the spaces, sides not sealed and, hurrying to contain, viscose flow slowing, stilling as its outer skin formed a shell and its inside set inside it. Set to the cardboard base, movement, halted by air.
Heating more for subsequent layers, I watch as the beads slowly turn to clear melted wax. They set in the pan, around its sides and, clicking the heat source back beneath it, a milky opaque circle diminishes around a clarifying, widening brim, a deepening clear liquid sack.
Off the heat and to the light from the window, milky disk floats in the clarified liquid, a part of itself, dissolving but floating with its own energy.
An almost empty stainless bowl becomes coated with the re-solidifying soy wax, like an imprint of itself.
In time, this bowl, retained without cleaning, accumulates dust onto this surface. As will other surfaces in the weeks that follow, that you cannot wash, cannot look at, cannot move.
It is watching continuity with every microscopic settling of every cell and grain. Spaces he has touched and cells of him and you meeting to form a container of absence, slowly being filled.
I am this container.
6.
Piled flour as mountains remained
loosely compacted
Static
Poured water forming valleys
and rain rivulets taking the top
into the downward flow
towards collected water
Powder settles creamily
Stacks below, clouding pool,
rising flatly under
A range in a saucer.
7.
Substance without interiority
Clavicle forming.
Rain washes
Particles down through the
Crevices
Powdered
(a solution)
Dissolved in the water like immaterial things.
In a room, a stairwell
Women in gowns ascend and
descend the spaces in a loop
and return to separate areas
to watch the clock.
(Looped movement)
8.
I am in a boat with tall sides.
It is made of wood and the size is enough for me to sit in tightly, knees to my chest, hips and thighs flattening against its edges.
I am clasping two scallop shells
Their edges brittle, two halves.
One lays in my left palm, its surface rough against my skin,
Greys like concrete.
The other lays over it in my opposite hand, two halves, not connected.
I hold them in a loose tension and sense in between.
A space of nurture, of past habitation.
9.
Reaching I fall,
Lying to rest above me
Disconnection, removal
Together is adjacent parts
Orbit in range
And matter expanding
Tidal force and gravitation
A mound still standing,
Dust gathers,
And particles slide
Left to the shudder.
10.
Sphere held loosely. Push into it with my thumb, fingers joined. Into the conjoining fold, forming a cap with its opposite. The shape of a scallop against my palm. The familiarity of the connection, holding something in the space between. Pinch to thin the edges, continue round, a shape emerging. As it does, it becomes equivalent. Joining the cracks and imprinting skin creases, I leave it uneven, shape as an ear. One in each hand, they resemble a pair. Similar, but not the same.
I continue with this imprint, connecting motion towards uneven pairs. Thumb, into and against dough and the opposite hand. Until it suggests the form I see, until I know it from before.
Rough edge of broken scalloped ridges on the pad of my thumb. In not pressing them close and allowing space, a magnetic field opens up. The absence (of the hand) draws mine into dialogue– move them further and they are no longer relating, too close and the tension is lost.
I circle each scallop around the other. Tracing its outer line, sense the pull and slip of opposing magnets. These might cause my hands to rotate in a circular motion. In this rotating rhythm I test the distance, the pull towards and away for these components and settle at a point of perfect tension. And after, the feeling of this limit is held in muscle memory. Held in the hands, a residual sensation – of interlocking. Holding and dissolving.
Body enclosed by two hinged parts
Valves fused to form two siphons
Opposing chambers
and flow of air
Passes in and out
A bivalve form
Suspension and continuity.
11.
A secret resides in empty space.
Unwitnessed, guarded,
It is kept hidden within palms.
Open to touch other purposes and activities.
They touch other things,
layer with surfaces
And things witnessed
Known only to one side.
Transferred, shared without telling,
passing on and remaining hidden.
Two parts contain things undisclosed.
Move apart to hear more clearly.
Radiate, gather ripples, transfer to a place within reach.
My closed door.
I am a permeable space.