small unpicked signal
sounding among a whiteness of gulls.
almost inaudible as (a smile?)
as wind noise, a relation to skin
that shifts to recall
its wall as a doorway
this body’s openness closed
around its own (function)
fiction of warmth
the small, mammalian sun
which declares an unbroken circle
of blood to the line of cold
sharpening the grasses
with frost
& climbing into
it’s (percussive) onslaught as though
trailing through snow:noise a picture
in the decay, a voice, the white trail
of song dropped from a mouth
once kissed or otherwise
oddly residual, the fish-hook barb
of a sweet, sharp taste
lodged in the dry
authority of the eye
(warming a circle, chilling a line)
sucking like a series of sweets
the forward moving field of air
in small glowing mouthfuls
propped more or less vertically against
wind, sound stipples and shards crashing against the body’s lines
trying to get to the thing
buried at the end of the bone
white nautilus of the
cochlear spiral
where once, in another season
at the end of the track, the blinding opening
of a bay, gaped like an unspeakable optimism
an (unlipped) hope,
gapped (in potential) suddenly
the soundtrack cuts out…. a launch of pauses at drift in a discman’s
dead charge animating the individual waves in the sea’s monotone…
memory loops against the words that seal the eye’s telescopic glaze
into distance…. but you have no telescope,
only this soft technology… (and there is no power point anywhere on
the beach)... only these words or parts of words washing up among the
types of grains these rocks are.... you move around its text until unable to
differentiate an image’s edge, this puzzle of a face mixed up with other
scenes and scraps… these beached salt-crusted ‘70s sunglasses, (have
they been out there ever since. (shipwreck?))... you move around its text
its midden of found shards, flints, shells, not trying to find an old order,
or yet able to found another... and in waves some subtitled decade ends
as another begins and begins…
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*[first published alongside the poem 'stations (loop for paused morning)' in the 35th issue of Auckland based literary magazine Brief, September 2007, pp. 42-49. a pdf of the entire issue can be found here]
