The Crime LINKS in the Smoke

in response to Scott Flanagan's request for an artist book for his edition The Rose Collection, Campbell Walker created a bookwork called The Crime LINKS in the Smoke. It was made from pages of burnt books, sourced from the strewn debris of detective fiction covering the upper floor of the Dunedin second hand bookstore Raven Books, where I once worked, and Campbell did for a while as well. 

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)]

'the desert Homeric'*

in arid cities we have read as syntax flooded streets, marked tides in museums where classical shadows
build birds of dust on their shoulders:

the old tongue sleep, forgotten, in patches, but still the thirst: the sky, a desert of tiredness, without image
to drink, but almost

the memory of rain, half-tasted, like jealousy in the back of the throat; the lake, maybe eroded, or a salt, unfed
expanse, a wilted

lip dragging dust boundaries, outside the circle of light, the marble horse's pupil gilded. sight splits a line, a dry
horizon, a pen

raised to the chalky lips of cliffs, the vanishing point chewed ragged by wide skies, a seedless devouring, graced by neither coherence

nor splendor; where we live, on the edge of the letter, a view pointing stillness, behind gray glass; time ripened
under the eye's

black canopy, the plum of a newly born century, split under the hard foreknowledge of a thumb; and after the music
there will be the calm,

a relocation of light, the movement exact, a trace of anger held between hand and paper; and in the wind, where
cartographies click, and the surfaces rearrange

their notes, the desert flaring, pulling a long story from our feet, after a lifetime spent suffering the stilted innocence
of flowers, to avoid the belonging, the dull love:

to walk horizontally along the edge of a word, blinded by sun, to forget what was seen, and what there is, and
beneath real heel, to gather the fiction of a hill:


--------

*[first published in Australian literary magazine Cordite, the Epic issue 31.0 (2009)]

'in morning, reverberant'*

in morning, reverberant

"The memory of a precise colour in the street bounces back on another country, another distance - endlessly." - Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

as a day unfolds silently and very fast.

as a dawn colour flooding in the lesser lamps and overtaken.

as a boundary of lit shards breaking in radial lines opening to graph the bay and further it.

as a creeping tungsten flared line of warmth and thaw through those eyes already open to it.

as the picture of a street which flutters down a street.

as description and commentary mainly recorded off-site.

as a repeated series of opening blinds cut into dark into light into dark/lit cutting.

as a sequence of bricked pillars arcing the potential for that part of the narrative.

as location footage gathered around this time of day over an indefinite period.

as happening again and again reinforcing the arbitrary site as centre of seeing.

as fiction and nonfiction trees that enable me to go on counting them.

as a never ending loop which drives by like an expected bus on time.

as a sequence of easily memorisable patterns.

as the tendency toward valuing certain small objects.

as a story most likely to be happening now that it is.

as lemon slice and coffee in the cafe breaking into speech, as one city into the memory of another.

as overlaid archival material of birds' upflight from the square as device of remembrance.

as worlds experienced while roaring inside the wild whiteness of feathers.

as angling in with desire's mathematics of storm.

as motioned with you as utterance, shoulder to shoulder.

as the attempt to know, eyes closed, and precisely.

as this detail, a material formerly unembodied, unheard or unpublished.

as nothing existing outside of this recording.

as an instant of what went before and failed to capture it.

as knowing even within the experience that it is already.

as an instance of what we were and merely.

as a series of copies or distortions.

as a repetition turning into and within the excess of language's unravel.

as replay of sequence in rolling sight.

as the same actors every time, the same speech, the same.

------

*[first published in the Australian literary magazine Going Down Swinging, issue 28 (2009), p. 7]

'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…

------

*[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]

'a gap, invisible in the photograph (lover's leap)', and 'field notes for love poems' (0:2)*

a gap, invisible in the photograph (lover's leap)

to hear imperfectly

this bay : opening

as grey lines, as colourless

light and wide

shifting in the body

axis : keying an actual sun

in forests' verticality : in solar re

verberations before

such rushed

suddenness of field : set

the devouring o-

zone depleted opening

in myriad capillaries,

dilating light & wide :

at the abandoned port,

the sea's rages range

relation, flats

to peaks, black

calm to tumultuous

blue : can such flatness

of affect be a level

of whisper : how

to locate among

columns, among names,

within such loud leaning

in doorways, a wish

for blanking

the eye's notebook?

cloud-parted grass

spines threading the eye's

trust toward water,

reverberating in each step

a season, releasing

a thrown momentary

confetti of burnt orange

Lepidoptera, decentring

myriad shadows, scrolling

at ferns' slowness :

a crisp wheeling inside

what is hoped,

what is happened, the path

silenced and settling

uneasily, again in these

greens, the eye

unhinges : fills, a gap

that is also all

that is here :

field notes for love poems

1.2

approaching close listening

stammer in actualities, greens

& subject's continuance,

river line threaded towards Taieri,

the gear shift of speaking

unwinding the catalogue

to simple nouns

hanging against clouds

as portals, vanishing points

carved in the ear's longing

an empty traintrack

a note repeating: a-a-a

----------

*[both included in NZ literary journal Landfall, issue 214 (2007), pp. 117-9. With the themeless theme of 'Open House', the issue was edited by Auckland based poet Jack Ross. more info here]