the sirens have been remaindered

[cegeste sound library #1]

-----

quail island / the sirens have been remaindered


at the edges of whatever
can be attended to : ordinary
sky over

orderly macrocarpa : the lack
of perceptive
limit, over

this unwalled line of sea
stones, as
the ear : stacked

against the unending lack
of a word, or line
of words, is

the edge of whatever
can be languaged :
they are not (quite)

bricks, & the sky’s lending
library, full of wrecked
systems (persistent

repetition of cirrus
phrases : seeming to fan
out from something

prior, indecipherable),
admits its gaps
without arrogance,

shelves this eye’s
openness at mid-
air’s deaf

point : to browse,
half-Whitmanic,
half-shattered

along these introduced
avenues, in the green
exuberance

this gift is : its space
of not-knowing
is a mouth :

is, the misc.
silences (lengthened, as
breath) between

the noon shadows, the memes of
stated trees. but whose freedom
is it? it is a sky

i do not always know
what to do with (how to deal
with : as the ship’s

graveyard knows
implicitly : the quiet
rust into oblivion

within the day’s
greater attention,
as metal flakes

restate themselves
to the ocean’s
equal blood-taste)

-----

[track created 2nd August 2010. location recordings made June 2009, in the grounds of seacliff asylum, dunedin. violin scratch-drone recorded in dunedin in June 2009, edited in wellington August 2010. the poem 'quail island / the sirens have been remaindered', also written in the first week of August, 2010.]

[for janet frame. with thanks to edie stevens and markus gradwohl]

'genetic noise [source text missing]'*

"It is by moving onwards, beyond the known, that No one and you, other reader, will hear the textual voice, which still remains to be heard, and which gives to each of us, after all, No one’s name.” - first names of no one, in The Helene Cixous Reader, S Sellers (ed), p. 33, 1974


, this snow
is
falling

on you,
on where
you stand,
on where
you
stood

[deleted]





it

[barely audible] , it





, happens,
even

in the antipodes,
this snow
hits
your arriving-

place





as modulations in
the after-

image, the
partition-
ed, lit
sequence
of [absences]

on sky-





as winter came, has
come, now
from the
other. sided
from the one, and

pointed
there





to skies. cast

as [name?],
as [date?], strung

in the radio
as micro- weave &
wave,
as spoke
to no-
, to every-.

listening





-cast
as/to sea &
sky.

as/is to know
to list as

absent, see

[inspecific]





as cold is
not
a place it is
this ,[question]


-----

*[first published alongside 2 other poems in NZ/Aust literary magazine Otoliths, issue 18 (August 2010)]