'jeanne d'arc / acousmatics of a beach, repeating'*

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]