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
its (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 powerpoint 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…
