found text ii

through beds of violets and tender parsley

fruits and nuts,
with simple sweeteners
and a bit of spice

no contour is blurred

hermeneutic spiral of interpretations

the richest journey in black, green

the wandering
and the homecoming
of Odysseus

letter

You do not possess the capacity to mourn: absence is not a lack but a quality. In the darkroom, your head-spaces, images appear as quickly as they blanch into colour with neither motive nor morphology.

I am struck by your waxwork skin, and might be less surprised to uncover your rusted frame, skeletal and tidy. These shelves store enough heartbreak to gather a field of dust in the still air.

Sincerely.

found text

image as surrogate/placeholder/conduit for emotion

seven haikus that will make u cry

generation to generation 

all of these tourists covered with oil

create anyone

let's talk

better         over

business 

You are a truth-telling people.

Hail

Mary who mattered to me, gone or asleep
among fruits, spilled

in ash, in dust, I did not

leave you. Even now I can't keep from
composing you, limbs & blue cloak

& soft hands. I sleep to the sound

of your name, I say there is no Mary
except the word Mary, no trace

on the dust of my pillowslip. I only

dream of your ankles brushed by dark violets,
of honeybees above you

murmuring into a crown. Antique queen,

the night dreams on: here are the pears
I have washed for you, here the heavy-winged doves,

asleep by the hyacinths. Here I am,

having bathed carefully in the syllables
of your name, in the air and the sea of them, the sharp scent

of their sea foam. What is the matter with me?

Mary, what word, what dust
can I look behind? I carried you a long way

into my mirror, believing you would carry me

back out. Mary, I am still
for you, I am still a numbness for you.

— Mary Szybist

The hill paddock

Searching for the missing calf
in the brittle light of winter afternoon

we found instead
a tuft of bloodied feathers
fluttering in the ryegrass

as though they could remember flight,
and longed for it.

—Joanna Preston

vergangenheitsbewältigung (III)

I begin the new year with a sort of existential gagging — the gag representing all at once the act and apparatus of a violent silencing, the medical device used to pry the mouth open, the physical sensation of retching and its inherent fruitlessness, and finally a comedic genre characterised by its physical, visual humour and radical subversion of expectations and normative language. Shorn of all other accretions this is the essence of experience thus far: the effect of silence on real human relationships, the subversion of it through gestures expressing resistance, the double-readings that take place at sites of malcontent and malice. I am trying to save these gestures (the silence that can be read, interpreted and re-interpreted) for a more worthwhile cause but the gag that forces open the avenues of utterance is nothing more than a dismantled, reassembled and reconstituted version of the gag that silences.