And in doing so lost both

because I can walk free
because there are trees, still
because I haven’t slept

Cut as opening, tongue
drip with honey antiseptic
acid. Lancets.
Things tearing themselves shut.
     Picture line heading straight from wrist
over floor to front entrance,
trailing out to street

Helen (IIII III)

Across the room, blue
at the door, flicking up a hood.
I don’t need to say they’re leaving

He’s a karyatid. That’s what I was thinking of, when I was thinking of limping wolves that gnawed off their rotten limbs and kept moving through the ice. He has blood on his lips. I thought so. All that weight he’s pushing up and he doesn’t even show it. I’d snap

Helen (IIII II)

Are you here?
You don’t tell me when you’re gone

try
not being seen, looked-at
unfamiliar

moving past moving past moving past

don’t fucking touch me

my skin’s like paper
sounds like paper
at least

what is the last thing

what is the last thing

what is the last thing you need to hear

—that was the worst thing you could have said

to help being

to know when healing begins, and where

I need to stop taking steps forward

that’s no kind of bravery

what’s bravery
what does bravery change

the next day a tree writhes up through the soil

even its green droop dissapoints
where’s the surprise in this

fingernails into palm. what a fucking
ache

nothing makes it better

try to bury that

Helen (IIII I)

I no longer
remember if it was you
   holding the door open

stop putting longing in me

You have a surface
I’m sure you have a surface              

I keep mistaking sounds, have I said this? Yesterday or a few months ago the leaf in the breeze at my back was\ a man passing on a bike. When I turned. Or the other way around. Wind as birds last \week. (\And I was thinking about the shape of wind, because you feel it in a shape,\ don’t you? or hear it? this convolving into something less than not-present). Someone’s in the halls.\ and I can’t tell if they’re crying or laughing. I hate how I caught myself up in that cliché. That tropes have wrapped up my tongue. I want broken glass there\. I want to swallow teeth. You see? Caught.\ Turns and turns. When I step into the shower I hear \whispers. This isn’t story now.\ none of this is story\. Turn off the faucet and they’re\ gone. When the water’s running again, they\ creep\ back\ up. they don’t reach the drain.\ That voice’s still out there\ gasping. And I still don’t know. It goes on and on.

Sophocles misreading

Immortality isn’t the plan. It is the enemy.

"But aspects cannot be added up."

Helen (IIII)

I can make you


he said

Helen (IIII)

I turn and you’re there
are no ways there
is no sense in this
question is a wound I
never saw you arrive

Helen (III)

| Why | are | you | always[ | stood | in | thresholds]? |

Helen (II)

Or how their passing by leaves stones in the pit of my gut
taste of sleep on the mouth

and afterimage
caprice of eyes so still

"Your
face
bewilders
me,
you
are
such
a
breather."

"ᴋʏʟʏᴛᴇᴍɴᴇsᴛʀᴀ: Go ahead, but if you go off to war and leave me behind in the house,
and you are over there, during your long absence
what sort of feelings do you think I will have in that house,
when I see the chairs she used to sit in empty,
and her bedroom empty, and I sit alone"

this is the stab in the throat
that bleeds five whole hours after.

you know his name
or this sense of his coat against your palm

What is this new
         what is this you so woe-compressed you'd do the same
                   as her as him you’d do the same
wouldn't you you do the same

"The Mind is so near itself – it cannot see, distinctly – and I have none to ask –"

"During the days and weeks I was working on this play I used to dream about translating. One night I dreamed that the text of the play was a big solid glass house. I gloated above the house trying to zero in on v. 363. I was carrying in my hands wrapped in a piece of black cloth the perfect English equivalent for lupein and I kept trying to force myself down through the glass atmosphere of the house to position this word in its right place. But there was an upward pressure as heavy as water. I couldn't move down, I swam helplessly back and forth on the surface of the transparency, waving my black object and staring down at the text through fathoms of glass."

ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ʜᴏᴘᴇ sidewinds away no longer
blood in this I try to say when it goes I go too or slip
lose routine
time measured by moon now light always clawing off it

"A.M. dread"

O
wane. earth pushing back
stones do not want me. do not want

"Besos brujos que me matan."

We must be drunk, I think. You seem to move with your eyes shut. Four of us picking our way along the grass bank sloped over Princess Road, throats full of cackles that seem to yawn. Calling out songs I don’t recognise. We’re all around ourselves. Beside ourselves. Each step staggers. Knowing where each other is by their footsteps, their breaths, their stumbles. It is bright enough to see under the street lights but we do not look or see. My arm brushes your arm. It is a long long walk towards your homes and it passes in breaths before it’s started. You laugh and ask why I’m still here, when you finally realise.

I should have turned hours ago. I live all the way back in the town centre. And soon enough I am alone again, on that same grass, facing the other way. I return ears still ringing with night voices more than a chorus or a clamour the hallway dark around me.

Suddenly your breath the only thing I can hear. Much much earlier you leaned into me and pushed your mouth against mine, and I inhaled. And now I’m sealing windows and doors and breathing out your air, finally. And the room fills with you, and when I move my lips it’s your words that come out.

His fire tongue his brimstone throat
we were always drawn to the flame and the heat we couldn’t hold the warmth
I couldn’t ever get to hold

but more than that I am grateful

and when they become more frequent I only worry how diminished they are

or may become

There are moments that are enough, sometimes, even as I’m worrying how to prolong them

'The House'

"It grows larger
wall after wall
sliding
on some miraculous arrangement
of panels,
blond and weightless
as balsa, making space
for windows, alcoves,
more rooms, stairways
and passages, all
bathed
in light, with here
and there the green
flower of a tree,
vines, streams
casually
breaking through —
what a change
from the cramped
room at the centre
where I began, where I crouched
and was safe,
but could hardly
breathe! Day after day
I labour at it;
night after night
I keep going —
I'm clearing new ground,
I'm lugging boards,
I'm measuring,
I'm hanging sheets of glass,
I'm nailing down the hardwoods,
The thresholds —
I'm hinging the doors —
Once they are up they will lift
their easy latches, they will open
like wings."

I do not know glaukós though I am sure
I am sure I need it.

(and the grey, what to say of the grey so grey I cannot see past it

that too though I do not own I pledge to you like I)

and the words I have not shared
the words with others I am sorry though I do not regret it you can it be that
regret comes nowhere near, blue as it is

The tree murmurs to the wind and for once I sleep

I am grateful to you
to the tree to the sighs the leaves
the roots through me I would not depart I cannot depart
grounded as I am,
earth in lungs tongue to copper green and blue water seeps
through my most solid borders
reaches wells and moss and stone that do not care I thank them

depart, part, it is no matter, there is no matter,
you

you

consolation, light, I do not know I do not
think the two must be separate

I say I am proud of you
All of it passing a greater passing I could not part with
this sting of the bones
to the bones,

i am cold come indoors, inside, I miss you, love you
departures
someone is yelling once (again) into the pillowcase

I need, I let go, I need, I breathe

Yesterday. And yesterday.

I can give you only what I was.

And I dedicate to you my bones
the ribcage
again and again
a pledge brittle to the sands the winds the flesh I lean to

memories, memories, memories.
Vodka and Coke.
features were softer.
faces, face, faces.
contours changed.
you are more bones now -
a softer I, i do not know

do I miss what is passed
or what is passing

S'a mia voglia ardo, onde 'l pianto e lamento?
S'a mal mio grado, il lamentar che vale?
O viva morte, o dilectoso male,
come puoi tanto in me, s'io no 'l consento?

Et s'io 'l consento, a gran torto mi doglio.
Fra sí contrari vènti in frale barca
mi trovo in alto mar senza governo,

sí lieve di saver, d'error sí carca
ch'i' medesmo non so quel ch'io mi voglio,
et tremo a mezza state, ardendo il verno.

narrative motor

Virtually a week seamlessly elided

"she could delay events with this groggy chemistry
of spasms and refusals,
a drowning, that second sleep, in lists of the undone

ungiven, unsought, the nausea could last days,
this room took shape now in yellow and brown,
a window lay behind a wilting curtain, tepid sunlight"

Here was enough

picture

she’s eating away at the margins
light floods from the corners until all that’s left is exposed
into nothing

and all the figures have scattered

One or both of us is impatient though he speaks

and then doesn’t. Our eyes are wandering beyond

our tongues. Lashes into my cheek looking like sunbeams.

And then off again into a vaguer proximity.

Pulling pushes where we are gouged into sensation

(or not, as it happens). A deeper ache from the withdrawal

of those hands, or worse, their absence (from the beginning);

a plummet. Too full of hunger. (      Yawning with it   )

His breath is in my throat. I’m filling with stale life.

Suffocating for more. And still he says nothing else,

though there is a moment- my lungs heave back

his air I move my lips and steal his voice. His frown

so ungentle;

I think he was afraid.

Helen

Imagine arriving at that place,
and staying.
and staying.

"the hous is krynkeled to and fro,
And hath so queynte weyes for to go -
For it is shapen as the mase is wrought"

Green shade, green shade, a week without food

2

You are too much bones to be so soft,
to fit in the arms this close against the heart.
I cannot feel between us and afterwards
I am staring at my spine.

(And I remember that rainy day we hugged,
even to the dark sticking of your hair to your shirt collar.
I have entire winters of you stored in my memory,
but I can never remember the cold, sharp as it always was,
I can never remember the cold.)

1

Low walls of brick and tangled chain-links,
and backstreets full of windows that led to parks
and cornershops, junctions, gravel
and nearby somewhere
the occasional midnights I would not part with
for the healing of me.

Still impotent threads bursting[
they don't even snap,
not exactly, just[

falling off lightly [ maybe? or even
something less than that and besides               ].
Never a clean cut to them,
tufts of string too soft to notice,
[there or] gone.
That's incoherent or immense and my eyes are going

Something completely other
and curved like a moon,
masked under leaves
and their scent.
Strange enough to break a bone.
And it breaks more than that.

The scent of all these
leaves. Where the hell have I been?
Breaking over summers.

I feel the craving of you
down to my toes
and the soles of my feet.
Thoughts veering into dreams it’s too easy
but the fire alarm wakes me up, and anyway,
it’s near summer
and we no longer share a bed. We can't.
We seethe beneath the covers.

"First there was the children’s house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house"

Leaving what stays for me, staying for what
leaves. I’m every limit this flat flat world
falls from. (Erosion. How I am renewed
always by what is torn from me.
)

In an earlier summer I found myself at a cafe in the Marais, with an American traveller who had also ended up in Paris that month. It might have been late morning. She’d had the place recommended to her, so she took me there. I hadn’t eaten anything for a few days, but in that moment I ordered an espresso, not a meal. I wanted to try a coffee for once, and it was the cheapest thing on the menu. It tasted as acrid as vomit, with a texture not much further off. Strangely now I’d give so much again for that awful taste, the bags under her eyes, the crumbs littering the table all over.

Instead I have a second-hand copy of King Lear. I found it this afternoon at a stall under the shadow of a bridge on Oxford Street. It belonged to someone called Katherine; judging by the notes that cover each page it was probably used for her A Levels, or earlier. There are many kinds of ink, and with each one she tracked a different theme – all marked off with a key on the inside cover. Red is madness, green is sight, blue is nature, and yellow stands for “ɴᴏᴛʜɪɴɢ”. As you move through the book they creep in more and more, until each page is saturated with kaleidoscopes of notes, even verging into deep purple for sin, loyalty wrought in amber, and a washed out grey for endurance, and I feel in all their small ways the words, not the words even but the inks, tell a different story entirely, and one of far more various colours, if they could only be all gathered up into the cradle of a meaning.

He passes by in blue
and says nothing;
I don’t believe him.

"I am surprised with an uncouth fear,
A chilling sweat o’er-runs my trembling joints:
My heart suspects more than my eye can see."

So it turned out that I did look into the mirror, and he did open his stone eyes, and in the end it happened as I said it would, which of course wasn’t much of a solace. Two moments of the heart thudding. Each a breed of fear.

“I hope this lasts,” someone said. “I hope this lasts.”

"Anyway what even is a ghost but a coda?"

The end of some great tale only now trailing off behind a half closed door, dead on the lips or dying.

The quiet sound
of your life, continuing on, is the finest memento mori.

The tree, the tree, the tree.
It's far from close and I wind about it
again and again convolving through myself.
The fissures of the bark answer life to the lines in my palms.

"Solitude. Hailey's bare feet.And all her patience now assumes."

The nine day sword has already rusted
by the time my flesh riverbeds into openness.
This is how the sky feels,
I gasp,
(still running beneath it,)
torn wide and bloodless.
Polished to an echoing sheen
by ink tongues spit and bleed.
Somehow,
for once,
not a contradiction.

It’s probably fortunate,
he goes on. Rips out a tooth and lays it on the table.
Leaves it. Leaves me
studying its pearlescent whiteness.

That’s one way to look at it,
he says, and spitshines a mirror.
Holds it in front of his face.
Asks me to stare.
Eyes and eyes needle through me.

I’m at a loss
Silly, each time. without fail
Learning to unhand an invented palm.
Certainly I could find lines there.
I could even fool myself and say I read them.
See them.

The cracks. The truth is I read another truth.
All I have. What I say now.

I saw nothing. I saw stones.
I saw your eyes.

On fire. Blaze a breeze. | I'll devastate the world

"Reveille Rebel"

late hour

Something again in the smile I can't place.

                How it creeps in after years
    and the black bark unlit behind.

"The old house, for those who know how to listen, is a sort of geometry of echoes. The voices of the past do not sound the same in the big room as in the little chamber, and calls on the stairs have yet another sound. Among the most difficult of memories, well beyond any geometry that can be drawn, we must recapture the quality of the light..."

"Riu's house stands out on the sky,
                with glitter of colour
As Butei of Kan had made the high golden lotus
               to gather his dews,
Before it another house which I do not know:
How shall we know all the friends
               whom we meet on strange roadways?"

Perhaps preceded only once by those lips sloping off into points and the blurred eyes downcast.

I've developed this habit lately (I say lately, but that only describes how long I've consciously been aware of it). In a daydream or a reverie I end up remembering some past encounter or incident or even, occasionally, something that didn't happen at all. They're always in the first-person. And if it's a pleasant memory I will suddenly emulate the smile I had on my face at the time, and if it's an unpleasant memory I might grimace. I think I wrote about this earlier, about metaphors that weren't metaphors.

I had a moment where it happened again. It was at the edge of morning, and I was leaving the apartments. There was something happy (re)playing at the back of my mind, and since it was too early to have things at the front of my mind, I smiled. I think there was laughing in the memory. I don't remember what it was now. There's a girl about my age who I see around the place, probably has a room here. She mostly lives as a peripheral blur. I've only ever seen her in passing, a half-familiar face. Today her hair was glistening from a rain shower that was already destroying the snow that had arrived the evening before. She was entering as I was exiting, and crossed into the path of my eyes before I could look away, or drop my smile, and I'd slipped into her gaze, and so she mistook my echo of a grin as directed at her - as directed at all, I suppose.

And her eyes brightened and she gave me the first genuine smile I've received for god knows how long. As if she recognised me. Or as if she didn't need to recognise me. As if she knew exactly what my face meant, and knew also how often it meant nothing at all, as if she took all that and let it fall between her fingers anyway. As if she were some accident of positioning, the hunched hollow of some rock face, shrouded by trees, on a mountain opposite someone's call already ended. And then she turned against the door and was inside, and I'd ended up by the gates.

130

Eros once more, limb melting, stirring me,
bitter-sweet bitter creeping in, insinuating presence

Pens

Another dream. As redolent with that plethora of too-facile imagery as the last. My doctor prescribes me a new medication. Sleeping pills, of all things (I woke from this dream at around 7PM). I took the parcel home from the pharmacy and opened it up. Inside, I saw a row of neatly packed, white, plasticy capsules. On closer inspection, I saw that they were pens, it was a box of six pens. Fancy ones too, not your run-of-the-mill biro but with metal clickers fixed on the top, and some inscriptions I didn't really pay attention to.

And I understood then that I was meant to write on my arms, that once the ink sank into my flesh I would get the sleep I (apparently) needed. No list of side effects. There weren't even any instructions. I just knew what to do.

Perspective seems to have gone awry. Or rather, it has flattened. I walk towards the park and find my eyes resting on the outline of the bare trees against the bare sky, and as I'm moving nothing changes. Nothing changes. The trees are stationary and my feet are moving and the floor is surely passing beneath me but I'm static. It's like a treadmill. I move and move but nothing looks any different. Everything is far off, never coming closer, I'm tending towards a horizon and it always eludes. If the earth were flat I would have plunged from its edge by now. Still, it all seems that way. Two dimensions, at most. I think now of a poem I wrote weeks ago, without really ever understanding.

Attica

When I finally returned years later
everything seemed foreshortened
somehow, or flattened. Even the ceiling
beams seemed thinner. Lying
on the floorboards in the loft,
the dust streaming through the air
over golden rays of light -
it had never moved since.

So many people I keep thinking I recognise. Manchester's not exactly small so why do I keep running into the same people again and again and again? Except I'm not even sure they're the same people. They just seem to have the same faces. I can't walk to a lecture without spotting them, and they all stare at me. When we pass. When we glimpse. And those are only the ones I've caught eyes with. Staring at me - to make matters worse they're all beautiful. Man or woman or anyone it doesn't matter, just looking at me? If I peered out now from the window I am sure I would see someone seeing me. Is this meant to be guilt? Or brain damage? Or both. Sometimes they smile and are gone before I've registered it, before I can smile back, if I even wanted to, whether or not I was supposed to know them, or not-know them. I might even hear my name being shouted out from somewhere in a crowd in Market Street but what do I know? I thought the sound of a leaf skittering on the floor behind me was a cyclist. Most things just turn out to be the wind. Something in the air.

I swear I can hear the mountains inhaling, the Pennines catching me at the throat and stealing my breath. That's just another trick of the mind, the oldest kind, a metaphor. What a difference it does make. Knowing that.

mort de rire

"What I see is a house, or the idea of a house, enormous and unknowable in its full extent, a house in which rooms only partly reveal themselves, in which mirrors are to be walked into, pictures disappeared into, in which chairs and beds are big enough to swallow you entirely. I can never see any part of this house, not one room, not one corridor clearly, only as a patchwork of dark and light (chiefly dark) containing isolated angles of objects or furniture. [...] and it has a music too, comprised of creaks, whispers and snuffles; rain on glass, branches on windows, someone singing in a kitchen, someone listening to a radio in a distant room, a music always elsewhere. [...] Some rooms are so filled with hatred you can smell it across a stairway. I couldn't begin to number the attics and cellars; the pantries, privies and vaults; the kitchens far below. There is no outside to this house."

Dreamwork

(I dwell too long on the difference between receding and diminishing.
Perhaps it goes this way:
First you recede. Then you diminish.)

I had this dream that I swallowed a pen whole. Then I spat it out again. Three nights ago I dreamt that I was being put into my coffin (alive). Why do my dreams always vomit up clichés? I've always had an aversion to dream analysis. The things it produces seem so tidy. A cheap neatness. I don't trust the way they fit into place.

"This phonetics - am I alone in perceiving it? am I hearing voices within the voice? but isn't the truth of the voice to be hallucinated? isn't the entire space of the voice an infinite one?"

As I’m shaving, I think of something we said and I smile in unintentional imitation of the grin I had then. In doing so, the razor cuts across my lip.

Because this actually in-the-flesh happened I can’t call it a metaphor, but I know how easily it could be. Perhaps in earlier times they named such things omens, though not prophecies but auguries of the past.

The shower is broken again; it will only go to freezing cold or burning hot. This, I realise from experience, is a feature of many showers, but considering how in the past I found a temperature in between, I can safely call the thing defective.

I choose cold. It is bearable; unlike the daggers of the other extreme, in the cold I suffer pain but do not hurt. Or I hurt but am not in pain. It is hard to call things what they are.

"Seeking but not finding the house builder,
I hurried through the round of many births:
Painful is birth ever and again.

O house builder, you have been seen;
You shall not build the house again.
Your rafters have been broken up,
Your ridgepole is demolished too.

My mind has now attained the unformed Nibbâna
And reached the end of every sort of craving."

                                  “wreaths of smoke”
      “in silence”

          “dwellers in the houseless woods,”

                        “alone.”
                                  “Though absent long,”





“Felt in the blood”

"A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought. He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten; one to whom
Long patience hath such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the Old Man hardly feels."

[mo[n]ths][

Somehow I had forgotten about April

"I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe ... we no sooner get into the second chamber ... than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere ... this Chamber of Thought becomes gradually darkened and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open - but all dark - all leading to dark passages. We are in a mist."

"cassandra: The stench of slaughter. The whole house reeks of blood.
chorus leader: How so? That's just the smell of sacrifice at the hearth.
cassandra: It's like the exhalation from a tomb."

Fall VI (Door)

Off a coat hook

(the weight being too much)

it just snapped.

"Sometimes
I'm terrified of my heart
of its constant hunger
for whatever it is it wants
the way it stops
(and starts)"

Fall V (The Tree)

I don't actually imagine the fall
would be so terrible,
cut short the way it is
by those sheets I spent months
convolving.


Hardly a breath
between the drop and the

Stop.

Perhaps the bridges here are less significant than the types of falling.

Bridge IV (Styal Woods)

I don't know how old that sleeping thing of stone and moss is.
A few years ago they blocked it off
with a low fence you could climb over
(and I did).

In the forest there's always dead leaves
flooding the earth, still, settling into years;
though mostly they slip off
the bridge. It has no rails. Nothing from the edge
to their fall. And on the other side
there isn't even a path.
It just gives way to earth,
a hill, leaves. Again.

Bridge III (Golden Gate)

Apparently my subconscious
had a thing for clichés. I dreamt

it was the calm of a face
too familiar to recognise
that lured me down
off that precipice.

Bridge II (Parc des Buttes-Chaumont)

From where I stood
it didn't look like much
of a fall, especially with the green
of that light the river cast back
to the stones.

Still, they strung wires
beneath the ledge.

A strange net for fishing.
Though, in retrospect,
it was with some difficulty
that I pulled myself away
to walk around the grotto,

studied the pool,
the artificial waterfall.

"Under the iron bridge we kissed"

The sky was iron too when you showed me that bridge Morrissey mentioned. "I hope you don't take this as a 'signal'..." you said, before you told me about The Smiths song, explained the history of that place. It was difficult. And yet such an ugly place, concrete twisted through with rattling chain links. They couldn't stop the wind.

It was the next day and everyone else had left when I was vomiting eleven times (I counted) in the toilet of your apartment. You were there in bed, facing the wall as I came and went, came and went. I'd fall back beside you for thirty seconds, before I had to climb up again. You said you were impressed by how close I was cutting it. I always just reached the bathroom before I vomited.

The next morning we had orange juice (not all had been mixed into the vodka) and croissants. Even jam. The sky was more or less clear by then, though it was still cold.

These nights I'm sat on my carpet by the light switch, hitting it whenever the next wave of nausea comes, so I can stare at the book shelves and imagine the world isn't spinning quite so much. So tired that I have to learn to sleep by increments in those small intervals. The ones when I've just switched the light back off, where I've managed to forget that there's walls all about me.

Verity Taylor

Your histrionics bow out.
I'm sorry, Verity;
you weren't soon enough,
not as late as
you should have been.

People played at imitating you.
The screams were hardly a substitute.
Even the doctors dismissed the fits -
done to death
psychosomatic
overacted
(shamelessly).


You are not found.

"I conceal myself in the shadows of a cistern or in the corner of a corridor and pretend that I am being searched for. There are rooftops from which I let myself fall until I bloody myself. At any time I can shut my eyes and pretend that I am asleep, breathing deeply. (Sometimes I really do sleep, sometimes the colour of the day has changed by the time I open my eyes)."

"I have also meditated on the house. Each part of the house repeats many times, any particular place is another place. There is not one cistern, courtyard, drinking fountain, manger; there are fourteen (infinite) mangers, drinking fountains, courtyards, cisterns. The house is the size of the world; better said, it is the world. Nevertheless, by dint of exhausting all the dusty galleries of grey stone and the courtyards with their cisterns, I have reached the street and I have seen the temple of Axes and the sea. This I did not understand until a night vision revealed to me that there are also fourteen (infinite) seas and temples. Everything exists many times over."

The tree croaks again its promise song.
what else is there to hear?
I hear it all. all I can.
sound over nothing. at all. by all. swallows all. all gone.

“GUIL: (Rapidly.) Has it ever happened to you that all of a sudden and for no reason at all you haven’t the faintest idea how to spell the word—“wife” —or “house”—because when you write it down you just can’t remember ever having seen those letters in that order before.... ?
ROS: I remember—
GUIL: Yes?
ROS: I remember when there were no questions.
GUIL: There were always questions.”

The mirage is nothing,
    it is still and flat.
         Only when figures pass,
cut over sight lines
   is there anything to see.
A flicker, sweeping across their feet,
             and in a blink I can see
                     around corners, looking at sky
    that should have dried up
days ago.

And when they go,
the sky goes too;
         horizons slack and lose
their curvings, lines diminish
into sand,
like that cheap plastic
        hourglass
which you unscrewed
 at the base,
          left an awful mess
on the windowsill.

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?

"Blaise, Dis, sommes-nous bien loit de Montmartre?"

“Yes, every matchstick has a history.”

]I was never here[

[speaking as the fortunate
     as if elision were
adequate.

The leaves fell
                         out
of my book,
one by one by all at on[c]e,

Once,
I tried [to recollect [
ambitions tending to dreams
of never needing
to dream again]

but still the pages
yellowed into

]] [][] ] ] [ ]] [an ecstacy[]]]  never[brittle][ [[[

It's about receptivity, I suppose. I don't need to say how different what I see is to what you see, what you see to what I see. Often we're trying to expand and expand and expand that perception, but there is also something to be said for contraction, for the sight that is not-seeing something, since the act of seeing will always be the act of not-seeing something else. Equally, not-seeing what another sees always was a seeing of something else, perhaps something less, but at least something unique. You see?

"Communication is more than just words, communication is architecture; because of course it is quite obvious that a house which would be built without that Will - that desire to communicate - would not look the way your house looks today."

Aldeburgh

In the loft I would wake
to the sound of gulls.
Funny, how they only
ever squawked when
they were by the sea.

False Poltergeist

Something happened over the past few days. Earlier last week, I went to the shower and it froze me. I played the whole self-deceit act of hanging the arm under the stream, waiting for it to heat, though it never did. The next day it still froze me, though I could make it through without masking hisses beneath the sound of the cascade. By degrees, stadially, it worked up a kind of warmth, not as my arm hung, but over a course of days, until frigid went to cold to tepid to something like warm.

Helen Mort said that poems start with a "haunting": "I’m visited by an idea that won’t go away and I often carry it around for months. The shapes of poems seem to bother me. And like the glimpses you describe, they always stay somewhere just out of reach. The best poem is always the one you’re nearly-but-not-quite writing."

I suppose this is relevant because whenever I stood at the edge of the shower, pretending it would resolve into heat, I would keep getting ideas for poems, in the way you do with ideas when you have no means of keeping them. The first few times I was too slow, and they threaded out of existence. I had no pen in the bathroom, no paper, and the thought would have left me by the time I retrieved any. So instead I had the idea of writing in the deliquescence of vapour that formed on the mirror while the shower steamed up (by this point it was verging on warm). But the problem was, over the course of the shower, I completely forgot about it. Left the room scrubbing my head with a towel, not glimpsing the lines I'd fingerpainted on the glass.

But of course the marks stayed, stains, coming into sight again only when the shower misted the room up. You can imagine that it was a start, seeing them again, as though for the first time, as though they had written themselves, as though a ghost had left them (for me? for them? for anyone?), formed out of air and water into a strange space of un-air and un-water, un-lines nothing like ink that the mist clung around. And the fact is I still don't remember having drawn those notes, that's just the assumption I formed, spending soaked minutes ennunciated by drips, staring past my reflection into those lines I (must have) left there. Because even if I think I recall that writing, I can't sever it from my imagining that recollection. Like a broken shower waking you up - except these only put you to sleep - false memories are a pain, and yet such a constitutive pain.