The sounds of the bottle depot against the rising light, empty rail yard. Sissing rattle of metal carts on road’s bumpy scalp. Glassine ank of empties jostling for position as they glide on tethered wheels from trunk to depot cradle. Pickers’ stretchy yellow hands : heralds of some future reincarnation, some travel, in place if not in time.

The fire crackle of plastic bottles being compressed. Some mass grave for artefacts Coke and Pepsi. Alchemist’s furnace beginning to heat.

Car door clunk where seal meets seal. The hollowed out boot, clean again and waiting. Vaulted rumble, empty container-truck, its whale-sized doors closing against unwarranted intrusion. Some impurity of sound or subject.

Voices, human, a tidal suck and gurgle. Small pools that barely sound, silent peal hidden under the faintest ripples. Others, rocky fissures hissing an outgoing tide.

And occasionally, the small peeping call of last year’s baby seagull sitting on a lamp post at the edge of the depot. The answering food-call of the yearling crow.

A motif in the general aural composition. The phoenix tail of sound. A sign of time reaching some dimension of perfection. Arrows

burning down into the world. Young women hidden behind the hillock grasses breaking the light into green drums. Strike a glass, a bell, bronze time to keep from moving into the past.

A low roar from the southwest sky.
The tunnel rush of hammered air : a blade, sounding; edge sliced, and day
cries out :

narrow shoulders of aural flame; time gravid with itself

: a newly risen city that you’ve never heard before

row of trees, giggling cherries that line the street
home, for a year, pink blaze belts wide blue neon

white gulls dip against their rumble
crows parade under shadow cast

pecking in, pecking out, the crow food-vault of tree roots
but not in the cherry branches, those arching regents 

branch tips seed sky
blazing ephemeralities

and then, rain, late spring
flower petals hit drop pink concrete

car windows succumb, shroud of pink eyelids
drumbeat of sap, trumpet of leaves uncurling

photons, trills blast, cannon fire of molecules shatter light
falling cubes of blue, air-sliced sun

beams cannot know if the fruit will come to bear
whether the tree will make it to seed

whether the seed will fall into ground clean of conflict
clean of poison and toothed browser

of developers, digging machines and darkness
of trampling feet and the pressing death of 4-wheelers

long silence of years while the seed turns in its grave
dark, warm brown, twisted fingers, seeking teeth

seeps into the future through deepened root
through a pierced stem, and finally, tight-lipped, a red bud

travelling in search of a muse
for living, imagine, in all its complex desires, gone
eyes silent, ears destroyed, leaving only
your kinetic sense, thump and swish of walking

not even the tactility of skin, but only
the bump, glide, click, swing of movement

your flight’s companion becomes a particular bone slither
some exact degree of slant relative to the inner-
ear’s deep knowledge of ground
skeleton articulates fossical relations

this is the click and swivel of bones articulating a walk down the hill
this is the hip arc in space-time, beat of slide, pelvic bones crest and trough
bones live in a spatial world of limited time
life length that rivals the mayfly, and again, that measure
one unit of eternity, crest and trough, iliac spine forward the ramus
and back, click slither, dip and rise, the hip speaking to the femur

this is deep magick, calcium mind
animal supervening upon type 1 collagen

death of the squirrel, the bones of a marmot listing to downhill
your impending end, world in its vertiginous
beauty, and the knowledge I was real
one joint click slither, dip and rise, ground isn’t a category of fetish
click slither dip, rise, cloud of mystical import
distant god of resistance, lift, tense, fall, turn on the wind of
musculature, lift, clench, fall, glide into the soft, sparking muscle

red fibre and blood, push tense, out and fall
foot’s ardor against the divine
strong ridged back of god
small bones against white tendons of time
rise up again and move

having made it real, it makes us able to walk out along the map’s contour lines, following ourselves deep into the world

Before

I feel like I’m huddled under the weight of my own personality, a brown wool blanket that heats up in the rain. The world disappears and the blanket becomes it all, the peek
out to the blue, or a pink gloss of a shoe going by, or the smell
of winter jasmine, all of them vanish under the warm dank of self

To the Port

like when language is so overt, screaming
through a sound system, full brass
orchestra so much so that the rest
of the world, all the cold
water of washing at dawn

Bus to a place to Sleep

warm irritation of sand between the toes
that won’t wash off, all of them
become a penny-whistle in the balcony of that orchestra
and it takes something to be quiet
to pull the plug on the blare of self and let the world return

Unpacking

to open the roof of the house, let in the wind
so that it lifts first the blanket’s corner and something
scuttles into the wool cocoon, another sound
Mingus say, or a mouse scritching
or even an itch, like wild-rose thorns against a shin

Out at Last

for a long time you forget there is a world beyond the heated wool
damp lanolin, smell of it, you don’t move except to feel
green-branch slap across your bare thighs, still
your elbows press their advantage
and then like the mystic at the edge of the celestial sphere
something peels up the skirts of the self, and the world
patters down, fingers listing against pale winds
curled into the bosom of atmosphere
a naked back under wind’s warm hand
or that hot honey of summer sliding down
and then, there is only here, and now