Excerpt from “The pool of depth and dirt”

Breath, or a sense of living, then […]


A crane is suspended above a large, dried plane.


The ripped paper hole speaks to its historical absence, or perhaps in turn creates space; a voice.

Inscription on the wood arrives before its meaning.

Meaning here is a murky brown-blue. The fog is on the wooden porch.

Helen turned at the bannister, and all of seconds stretching and arching over architecture are paused.

Meaning married to always different

coordinates. I married a foreigner, in one sense.

In another, no word fits with another.


All things anticipate, meaning we live for the future, and are constantly forgetting.


In this shape is a repeating habitual noise of the same repetitions, of ancestry and agriculture.

The ‘oh’ marks a desire for connection, between me and you, green things and this web.

I mow across golden fields in erratic lines, searching. Seeds scatter and bloom, changing shape and colour as

the sun rises and falls.


Silence is cut across grey waves in a lexical, Swedish storm.


Your eyes twinkled on the surface, resembling the water in the dock on a blue day. It made me scared of the

space under the bridge.


I stand before an old wooden bench, trying to make out the names inscribed in it’s oak. The pavement is grey

and wet: I am a blue outline. I see Mina.


In B’s beard is a long, finite wire, tangled in white hairs and making its way to the formation of a sculpture.

Back at home the fireplace of ‘E’ is a welcome memory: it holds soup, language wells and warm fish-bodies.

This is what Bachelard was getting at: space

holds language and carries fishing nets

reincarnate.


R claims there may be no well in this field. I think we must believe in the well, even if it’s existence lies only

in the a priori.

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE WAS ONLY FICTION, but is lived out in white fences.


I’m in ‘a’, you’re in the ‘priori’. The field is at the boundary of the empirical, which, in it’s fullness, creates

thirst. In one sense, mowing a field is a form of

labour. In another, it is art.


In the crops I cut a ‘c’, which could spell or merely mark. RW says there are no fish in her mouth, and I

believe her.


‘Come back, crawl to me child’. I reach my hand into the reflective circle of water, and pull out a fleshy rope

from the American Civil War. It reads:

universal.


I heave out a long, hollow pipe.


The tube is the anticipation of sound.

Textures of distant voices can be heard from the depth of the twentieth century - Modernism, I think it’s

called. Isolationist: formalist: a perpetuating

circle.


the historian would forget that what is at stake

is an adventure of vision

Poetry remembers. Each day is a layer and it makes a trifle of solidified, connected letters.

Cutting out an ‘E’ in sponge: leaving negative space, and perhaps the vague outline of a perpendicular cross,

marking the death

of religiosity in secular language, which persistently attempts to write over.


My daily ritual of purchasing and slurping chocolate milk is becoming a habit: I search again for the words.

Now we worship things, I suck. I read. Boris’s furniture. I read of Christ’s furniture.

We know what’s at stake, what’s on the stake.

Books/spines as mattresses, for letting you lie softly in a giant pink hand. I turn the page and see ‘ove’,

which could mean ‘over’, ‘love’ or ‘stove’. In

any sense: they all incite desire.