In ResponseConsidering the stack; a restless knot of complications that mirror our ‘other’ selves. An archive of gaseous maps—a movement within a mass.

It’s a trail of secreted points,

The blurred, buried kick of

reversal. An ominous hum.

A net, worked.

Mercury FallsMercury    f

a

l

l

s, like skin off a bone.
It fleshes and folds and corrects, a tender nod to unrecognisable shadows.
Masked by a deeper sense of time buried in the flesh of Acacia; the alkaloids, a mass.
The stretching of reality into resonant ash.
A mass of buried threads.

Since

Since you’ve been gone.

Snow melt


If mercury riffles.
If thread veins.


vugs
folds

Vein

Thou troublest me; I am not in the vein.
William Shakespeare

Fleshy ledgerThis fleshy ledger of tables. Cells and columns read this way and that. Bruises that are slightly tender. Tender on the tip, tender on the flesh. Tender but not rotten.
—Look how the colours are always changing.

Crab

In the Year of the Crab, local currency is exchanged in the street. Wheelbarrows of feathers balance the commodities of bark and gravel, while somewhere a seismometer traces these transactions in a ledger of kindness.

lip sink

lip sink
link sip
pink slip -
a guide to the correction of errors, or to guide the error of correction.

TouchTouch is another language that we don’t speak of.

folds

Is there a word for the smell that escapes from the folds of a new garment when lifted from its carry bag? The same scent that stays just a few inches from your body on the first day of wearing, but fades on the second.

hank

Two people, seated, facing each other. One holds an elliptical hank as if reaching out.
The other translates it into a sphere.

Two people, seated, facing each other. One holds a sphere as if reaching out.
The other translates it into an elliptical hank.

Two people, seated, facing each other. One unravels something finished.
One winds something unraveled into a hank.

Repeat. Switch. Repeat. Switch. Repeat. Switch.

Re-call reaching for the lightRe-call reaching for the light
Undulating golden waves

bullrush

Bullrush, banskia, bald eagle, Brindabella, blush. A bridge. No, not a bridge. Just the pillars staked out across a river. Stationary amidst waters that never are.

Goat hair

Goat hair - skins of purpose
**Samuel 19.13 The hair of goat used to form a pillow or head rest.

to ground

Gone to ground, as in, they won’t eat it once it’s gone to ground.

Little Falls

A diamond which is not a diamond.


Marble which is not marble.


Another invisible former life.

You sayYou say pound for pound. Child as double agent. Something like certainty. They don’t call it a punch line for nothing.

copperCopper at the bottom of the ocean; floods of conducting threads. Operatic splendour where the Pioneer Seamount cable crosses the continental shelf offshore of Half Moon Bay. Rockfish. Basket stars. Flytrap anemone. And still the relays here and here and here know nothing of this life that pins the cables to the ocean floor.

a vehicle for memory, a language for telling secrets

pound

Pound for pound, noun for noun.

Departure

The opposite of a mountain is leaving. Or, if something so seemingly still can’t be the inverse of a verb, I would say Departure.

Arriving

Arriving gently at this place, to walk into the swelling of deer drinking - large bodies of skittishness

Ending

how is it that we can know an end before we start? Wasn’t it Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being that left us with a family driving into their future, the tragedy awaiting them only known to us, the reader?

Of birch and rock

      I am walking in my body from when I was a child. I haven’t been in these woods since spending hours in the creek down the hill behind the house in a hidden tangle of trees. Since peeling white birch bark to discover the ancient papyrus scrolls that likely had never been seen before. Days of practising in pen and ink a calligraphy of a new alphabet, composed mostly of Cyrillic mountains and valleys, and not actually letters at all - not language at all. A way to travel inside D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths (a landscape of the mind). Damming the creek, moving branches and rocks and being very, very busy. Melting slugs with salt and not understanding what it was to do that. Finding lady bugs between the window screens.

Heart to heart

She was speaking from her heart


A nervous moment of tenderness


Fear weighs heavy and close


Words bringing us to presence


It’s only a small thing.

Sheets of rain. Sheets of glass.

Sheets of rain. Books of mica.


Code word, umbilical.
Code word, lure.

Faire couler de l’encre.
Couler des jours heureux.

to drawI draw a lure in a long, drawn out line from enervation towards something deeper. Before the initial sensation, before the onset, it felt impossible to imagine the warmth flowing out across my limbs like the morning rays, or my body melting into the space prior to a place of rest. But sickness can bring wellness along with it, as long as labour is covered by the endless accounting (for). Now, for a pause (this body is full of it).

back threadsIt’s spring – time to clean out the cupboard and tidy up those threads.


#1
Just possible, holding tight — mute or silent? Today, I could say, thinking of the blankets, I unravelled — that is loosened as if pulled apart by fingers. I could say I unravelled and I did — but like a flame igniting, burning blue with insight and clarity of mind.


#2
Softly un-doing, circular, clickety clack fireside smoke. Or is it all too open and loose? Maybe she yearned to be swaddled again — warm arms across her chest, curbing the startle response. Simply gold.


#3
The line between holding and binding, constraint and containing — it can shift, blur. Confusion is possible, or it is inevitable, or it is the ground for conversion, for transformation (in the myth, when she is caught by the arm, the girl turns into a bird). Here, the grass just has been cut; the smell of coming rain is falling, rain will follow.


#4
The blanket offering shaped around loss. Spooning into the other breathing skin – so close but distanced and weighted with far off dreaming. An aura of body brimming with past—now the sweet smell of ozone and lights out at sea.


#5
It’s a blanket (of course it is), but it’s something else, too. Deerskin cloak or feather cape — creature warmth becomes performance. Rain falls, pavement darkens, and I remember that a body is a body, even when it is transforming.


#6
Imagine smoothing the blanket, stretching time. Today things didn’t go according to plan —oh those holes — gulp and swirl, my body glitching like a snagged thread. But the bulbs have returned, pushing upwards because they can.

knitting pattern

knit 1

or

slip 1

knit 1 (RS) purl 1 (WS)

= Morse code dash

= Morse code dot

= Morse code gap

= Morse code word space (knit RS, purl WS)

Morse-today

knitting rows#1
Singular tension, the introduction of colours and stitches and changes. Rows include the hand, the eye, the tongue; and all the blues and greens and greys in the oceanic sky. And also contradiction: at the end of a row, reverse and travel backwards to where you began.

#2

We move forward, we double back. Is there a mutual space of joining/meeting between? With my fingers, I create a netting that holds or spills or seeps. Or, blinding yellow sunlight light – the memory of it – when we finally came out of the beach shelter (or the living-room blanket fort).

#3
Light also passes through the weave of the blanket – it isn’t dark in that underneath. A blue shadow is no less a place of comfort. The shadow is itself a place, not a mark or trace of something, but a thing in itself.

#4

Sink into the tinge of green, of mossy tree house floors. Even a thin membrane gives protection. But is it springy enough to survive the flood?

#5
Of course – I’d almost forgotten, while we were looking up, about the ground. The green-going-silver, the smell of hay and herb and strawberries. The knitting is sure and warm. Comfort, safety – these can also hold you solidly in place (can also make it difficult to move).

#6

This prone underbelly rising and falling against the ground – reaching to root itself into another geology. Sheltered, down into black moisture. All the while beneath the open canopy of lacy trees.

#7
Return to the idea of holding, the hand making the shape of a cup. It is functional only to a point. It’s like language – something always, eventually slips through.

#8

Layer up – dressed and wrapped and covered in wool – warm as a dog’s winter coat. Russet and gold fall and fly; soft and cool light. Did I forget Australia was built on the sheep’s back? In any season, the smell of sheds, slatted wood oiled with lanolin and grease. Repairing the blanket cannot be rushed – best to have a few holes.

morse code embroideryThe lacing of a moth’s wing.

My body is full of it.

I imagined morse code embroidered in gold – another layer of yarning.

In deficitTo rest (in deficit) and feel my nervous system throb with coagulated stillness. To steal a thread back from labour’s long weave; a surplus shadow sunk deep in this fleshy ledger. Otherwise we are only half living.

I’ve been considering this ‘idea’ of rest from the point-of-view of deficit. Mainly because even when not in movement, this body feels entangled in some kind of thoughtful labour. Time and glucose extracted to the nub. To be ‘in’ capitalism, is an endless mine shaft of thinking and doing, a relentless underground of over work. This vessel is stained in the colour of the market, and sleepless in the shape of an infinite fleur-de-lis.

anewHow to draw rest before we are tired? It is so difficult not to chase the sequins. When the sun is high and moon just hanging light there. The sparkle. The fizz. My body is full of it. How to lure stillness from the fizz?

fatigue

Could we rest before we’re tired?

Volcanoes and Mouths

In 1997, after my first trip to Iceland, I would go to the Mid-Manhattan Library in New York and spend time looking through every folder they had of pictures of volcanoes, any type of geothermal activity, of Yellowstone, the Morning Glory Pool, of glaciers, of vast vastness. You weren’t supposed to make copies, but sometimes when I would take them out on loan from this library of photos and clippings and pictures instead of books, I would. Once, after a guilty trip to the xerox shop, I took my volcano copies from one National Geographic or another to the studio and obliterated every word except – VOLCANOES and MOUTHS, floating on the page together. And years later, after a field trip to Big Island in Hawaii to meet Kilauea – I thought – the volcano is like a body, it breathes in and out through the mouth of the crater … its lava tubes an arterial system connecting one chamber of magma to another.

Today

Today the border is ample and wide. Sequins and small orange glass tiles erupt between plantings of tiger lillies, perfused with sage.

uplift

Yearning to be uplifted. Is this tipping, rocking an attempt to find equilibrium? To rebalance a broken heart?

Edge

An edge is no edge at all, but a kind of crucible: a point where solids are liquids are gas, electrified, and back again.


He was fishing at the edge of deep water in a small tin boat, high in a storm. A shaft of lighting as thick as a building hit the water, as loud as the start of everything, if there had been a sound in space. I could have reached out and touched it, he told me. Ears singing and in shock he pulls the boat up across the rocks and sand, the rain dissolving any borders between water and air, past and present, centre and edge.

Life buoy

Life buoy

ife buoy L

fe buoy Li

e buoy Lif

buoy Life

uoy Life b

oy Life bu

y Life buo

Life buoy

What washes up is lifted, held.

Offered back
tethered in residence time
threads the sea

tenderness

ExactlyExactly that. Two sides of the same plane. Visible at once.

QuestionYour question of rest and its balance of activity and passivity makes me think of what it takes to buoy a body. How inside our bodies it is some kind of unknowable equilibrium that affords our buoyancy in the world beyond.

mirrorhow can it be that we see both sides at once?

rest now

Could this improvisation begin each time anew? Could we replace new with now? To move towards a state of nowness, alert with presence.

Is it possible to be with the uncomfortable, the muckiness of uncertainty and the unimagined? To still the future — to observe the pulls backwards and forwards.

Is it possible to believe in rest enough that it could lure momentum to stillness—to be persuaded to hear our depth of tiredness, to be able to rest in this moment.

What would happen if rest and activity were of equal weight?

If now was an endless thread of softening.

If rest was an elasticity— a transitional place of evenness in the electrical body.
Where rest could move us towards a meeting of unknown parts.


But rest needs preparation, a desire to feel differently, for things to change.

Rest is a homecoming embedded into the fabric of being – why did we not learn this?

rest

To forget what it was to rest,

re-set, re-start.

Rest isn’t passive.

Rest (water)

Every day now, around 5:30 in the evening, I swim until just past the moment when I become aware of my arms, legs, back, shoulders, neck. Basically, until I am almost too tired to swim anymore.


This has led to sleep.

Every night now, I am drifting into deep sleep. Unheard of for weeks, for months, almost impossible to slip into before.

Last night, I dreamt of the volcano in Iceland. The eruption in real life began yesterday afternoon. But in sleep, the volcano was in a room. I opened the door and crept inside to try and see inside the new crater. It was knee height, indoors, and at the same time as vast as a field. I looked into the volcano, and around its edges were teeth, at irregular intervals, encircling the mouth of the crater. Volcanoes and Mouths.

White DogI dream of a big white husky-like dog, too big for a lap, and yet there he sits balanced on your knees with your arms encircling him.

thick-withThe air is thick with bother. Sometimes it’s a struggle to even exist. Does anyone else feel that? The ropes of smoke buried deep? The customary lichens? Shivering as the world grows over born, to a yet impossible stretch? I write to you, but across the margins.

A river 

runs beneath us. A tangle of threads, a roaring rush.

air

To climb out of that air. To scramble it. Now that would really be something.

estrange

An estrangement, yes exactly. Memory tells me we were once more than these separated parts. We had to be didn’t we? The countless repetitions speak to that. You say there is a record of progressions? Can I see it? A ledger before the memories. When pressure was made of something outside. Something beyond the loop loop slush of the circle.

Dad‘I don’t know how to love him the way I love you’.

Yes you do Dad. Yes you do.

half-livingStained in the colour of the market. Afferent fibres travel towards. Otherwise we are only half-living.

ExtractionThe body as a site of extraction, yes. It’s hard now even to say what was taken.

softlyAnd softly to myself I sing.

Out of touch.

Out of time.

immerseThese ghosts that tug and yarn another me. A circle of vaporous thread surfacing in fits and starts; in hooks. A borrowed moss, a leaking gutter. Eventually they move along, along with loneliness. It makes me wonder if the digression is a way to relative safety?

ex-stack

But also wondering, do crisis apparitions remember?

MV

I saw the footage yesterday of the stricken cargo ship MV Portland Bay stranded in the ocean south of Sydney harbour. I saw the tug boats attempting to tow it to the relative safety of deeper waters? For a split second there, I chunked the shape of relative safety. Felt it ride the whole length of my spine. And then nothing.

The vessel and I remain at anchor. Tethered to the chop and chaff. That is churning. Await improved conditions.

behind

Ive been feeling somewhat without myself this week. It’s hard to describe what this kind of absence feels like. It’s like you’re carrying something that you know is not there.

Some kind of seizure or avalanche of empty.

Extracted

A void, not of space,

but of temporality. I’m

feeling this body as a site

of extraction, a fleshy

mine. A ledger.

I keep having memories of shadows I’ve known, the ones tasked with caring for a younger me. Before the labour began, carved out by the shape of someone else’s recidivism. When I think of being left in a large, three story house, much larger than our own; my hair stands on end. There’s a void, not of emptiness, but buried mass. A blackness, deeper than coal. Being left, without an anchor.

The link; a memo I

somehow missed, a

warning of indebtedness

that cannot be climbed

out of, a future primitive.

knownI have those shadows too. Impossible now to imagine how they took the shape of absent light. How that atmosphere became pressure became language then once again became air. I wish I could say I was full of something else, but like I said. I just feel hungry all the time.

commoness

Before the memories. Before the future. Before a loss. An indeterminate hole. A hot blast of burning trouble.

Tear

Primitive.

Mourning.

Tears.

Flooding pigment in watercolour thins. Conglomerate.

EnvyEnvy of the mosses. The liverworts. The lichens.
A low slung body with a million threads running wetland into cobble.

fallingI ask myself, are we not

all bodies falling?

a stackI’m collapsing into the stack. Plucking loops of sound, internal words, inching before the future’s made visible. An exercise in pattern recognition. A taciturn inclination, circling.

square

In almost-squares—pure colour stays the Interlocking loops of yarn. Each stitch completed before the next one is begun. Each circle back to itself. A circumference of hollow. What is completed.

Spent

in hooks.

And half-moons.

Tick, by tick, we feel towards a cave in.

Afferent

I catch myself on more than one occasion, attempting to synchronise my heartbeat to a slice of air beyond. A leaking gutter on the north corner of the roof holds promise. Until the

tap

tap

tap
of falling liquid turns into something too easily absorbed. I feel it in my chest wall, my fingertips. The anticipation. Bio-synchronicity. I once felt it in my right shin, beneath the white cotton sheets of a Oaxacan hotel. Dull, harmonic thuds of a distant church bell fluttering my leg bone.

Only when I tried to walk did I recognise as grief, this curious sensation of church-shin-bell.

Along with loneliness. We feel towards.
A warm limb. A warm limb.

PerhapsPerhaps it would be better to run.

And yet. Somewhere in the tender outskirts of this heart, I know that moving that fast in any direction will not be enough to stop the swedge. Nor mend a future to this muscle that is still trying to resist exploitation, even momentarily.
 

NowNot-doing, as repairing the bones; that knit and hold it all. Seeds drift into freshly dug holes. From the window, frog spawn sticking to the bitumen

OursOur Generous Structures of Recess,
Our Generous Structures of,
Our Generous Structures,
Our Generous,
Ours.

SpeakingSpeaking of resistance. Soft and yielding. In the dogwood’s ever decreasing rings only frost crack and

scold can be self-repaired.

towerThere is something so beautifully, so enduringly elegant in an experiment made by simply hurtling weights, maybe rocks, off a tower.

Floofiness

Floofiness, the friction that arises where filaments

touch, or

when mycelium divine what they need most to shimmer

their entire network.

Non-Embrace the art of not-doing. An alignment that resists force and coercion through gentleness.

Dear —, oooo oooo ooo o oooo oo o. Love —

A droplet, a flood. A substance soft and yielding.

A relative digression: the ethics of sitting with forgetfulness.

To the root

A shifting pattern,

the pattern patterns.

A relative digression.

as if, to digress.

Sinkholes, of course, can spontaneously open ground at any time. Swallowing in one, long, granulated bite,

. A this-ness that thickens through falling?
 

longing

Longing;

to long.

Along with,

loneliness.

Remembrance

, is something ‘that happens to you and in you’. These prickles,

, just another adaptation of collapse.

protect the plant from being

from the outside in. Oh, for a shield! Milk. Sow. Golden. Globe. Canker sores and plague. Adrift.

s-twist thread 
Divining this thick present

/ this mote & flow

/ If a seed drifts into a freshly dug hole. If this-ness thistles.

If this-ness thickens around a mourning border:

,

, here.

A_A water-bearing permeable rock, a tear duct, a golden primitive in place of one’s own natural refuge. The deepest recession is already infinite, and yet we are worked, in spite. If only to become the object of our tangled desires.

tickingtick
tick
tick

on studyAnd so we sit with disorder, in-between. In illegitimate spaces. Our study becomes erratic. To thread a learn, a debt, a hole; a reaching excess. We ingest. A machine, an artwork, to bear. Our body becomes a fold.
 

and_And we work; the words. To stretch, to breathe, and with; as if evenly countered. Our body; already a spectre, casts a shadow of ‘primitive’ accumulation.
 

The goalThe goal. Within and without.

An estrangementAn estrangement.
 

SometimesSometimes you pass yourself

an idea, moments where you meet

these moments where you know the growing

Sometimes2In this moment—passing myself—all in one (many time zoned) day.

moemA moment;
To cause or give rise to. Without labour.

of labour 
Our body, an economic entity of surplus consequence.
An involuntary spasm;
an unwinding thread of a shared alienation.
 

and we restA rest (if) only to forget the labour;
if only to fit a casting doubt.
The process, a whole. A singular threshold.
An infinite debt we weave our way out of … and into again.

We record each progression, in fits of pressure. Of laboured time, in circles.

Drawing out. And back into.

Raising the hands

in countless repetitions,

and slowly drawing back time

superimposition 1Stir and double, haze and blur

; knowing and not knowing and half-knowing.

Superimposition2suggest a range of actions—to overlay or overlap, collage, and assemble, collect, arrange, place

… consider too, verbs like cover and hide, intrude, impress, conceal and obscure

.

comets

meteor 1The meteor left behind it a luminous train.

sometimes3One room over, a large constellation. And across the world in many directions.

superimposition 3As in thought thrown back on itself

on the past or on the absent.

A matrixA matrix, reaching.

A warm limb,

through a context, a shadow.

A solemn sigh. The work is never

complete.