bend to accommodate
sunrise: we watch
without subtitles
the train window decoding
the morning:
gold-dusted shops
flattened, refracted
in the glass: a townscape
propped up
like an album cover
the train window decoding
the morning:
gold-dusted shops
flattened, refracted
in the glass: a townscape
propped up
like an album cover
*
instabilities in vision, brittle silk
at the eye's back, flags' ragged narrative
fraying into wideness
& silence, not final
in the thud of this wind, dull and open
against scarred plank-wood, salt-
pocked with a blunt
stubble of migrations, autumn
not yet winter, but this seasonal
loneliness that buds, that lengthens the sky
into fibrous lines, the very idea of a screen
pressed hard out of the pores,
meshes of duck flight
projected onto the inversion
of blue, no longer a colour but
this well, at the bottom of which
whatever you have lost
is still, somehow, visible
*
sit as yourself, as a series
of stills, of rings
in this chair's
momentum, your hand-
held blindness refracted
overhead. trees, bare-
threaded reflectives
that slip clean through
the book to the optic
veinwork, the nerve's bark
of rinded categories
cannot veil this landscape's
skidded shorelines, its saline
tides crystalised:
*
(paint backing
the eyes, peeling
a sight-worn shelf-
life of image,
ragged flagged
reading attempts
flick in patched
anthem of cones
and rods shorting
into silence
…)
*
some hopeful remark, re-phrased as preamble
for the sun, mirror-writ
with unreliable
stylus, finger-
width in thick, breath-crusted glass,
its text dissipating already into a pre-winter
that seems to hang
in the window like a headache's
white compression, amplifying the dull
recognition of lack – caffeine, perhaps? –
& the equally yawning anticipation
of its opposite –
shards of scenes shuddering
through the small still space
of your drifting image, its rolling
recurrence in windows full to brimming
lip of noise, the thin
electromagnetic shift a whine needling
brain's greyscale, bleeding
its repeats over the aural
rim, lulled train-ride
autism of the muffled winter eye
crammed with impacted elsewhere,
its hivelike fill of image
syrup, soft pixels
of thick, trapped sun:
*
at the eye's back, flags' ragged narrative
fraying into wideness
& silence, not final
in the thud of this wind, dull and open
against scarred plank-wood, salt-
pocked with a blunt
stubble of migrations, autumn
not yet winter, but this seasonal
loneliness that buds, that lengthens the sky
into fibrous lines, the very idea of a screen
pressed hard out of the pores,
meshes of duck flight
projected onto the inversion
of blue, no longer a colour but
this well, at the bottom of which
whatever you have lost
is still, somehow, visible
*
sit as yourself, as a series
of stills, of rings
in this chair's
momentum, your hand-
held blindness refracted
overhead. trees, bare-
threaded reflectives
that slip clean through
the book to the optic
veinwork, the nerve's bark
of rinded categories
cannot veil this landscape's
skidded shorelines, its saline
tides crystalised:
*
(paint backing
the eyes, peeling
a sight-worn shelf-
life of image,
ragged flagged
reading attempts
flick in patched
anthem of cones
and rods shorting
into silence
…)
*
some hopeful remark, re-phrased as preamble
for the sun, mirror-writ
with unreliable
stylus, finger-
width in thick, breath-crusted glass,
its text dissipating already into a pre-winter
that seems to hang
in the window like a headache's
white compression, amplifying the dull
recognition of lack – caffeine, perhaps? –
& the equally yawning anticipation
of its opposite –
shards of scenes shuddering
through the small still space
of your drifting image, its rolling
recurrence in windows full to brimming
lip of noise, the thin
electromagnetic shift a whine needling
brain's greyscale, bleeding
its repeats over the aural
rim, lulled train-ride
autism of the muffled winter eye
crammed with impacted elsewhere,
its hivelike fill of image
syrup, soft pixels
of thick, trapped sun:
*
conversational partialities, like pocket crumbs,
dot the ground of a minute's incompletion, a tension
stalled in shoulders, rush-released in cigarette smoke on the platform,
fluttering in the train's collected stops.
anticipation's drift sculpts the moving process of a moment
in the stills of windows, and how long
will the flared filament of this minute hold
through the brittle glass of your attention, will the thin
and frozen things unspoken, hang like smoke rings
their fragile framework in this pause
some disappearance sculpts an absence, which opens
still as immersion inside speaking, a name, dropped
stone thrown and spreading, sea change in a lung cell, in a face
self-stung by cold's brisk, flinching knowledge:
*
(it is not seasonal
it is not silence, this cold
that marbles no, we are not
allowed that cleanness,
what to say, and who
to speak to: that place:
…)
*
the pause, as after
a distant accident.
pooled ring of
handshakes, drawing back
to history. these tears
are screens, they
are not precious.
will we find a flow
that might clean
the ruined moment
from our hands,
from the hands
of the clock,
where inland seas
strain for an ear, a hearing
before the sirens start.
fastened to the second,
stapled to it,
our knowledge, these
remnant gestures
crouched in the bone
like fossilised
sunshine, as
artifice fails
*
(pour and re-draw
of this enthrallment,
which is a scrolling
down the contour of
memory's
lathed phonographic
flip, it scrapes a surface
and over
…)