Trying to go back through things here and find stuff that I can put together. A lot of it I prefer just as it is, fragments falling on one another, little squares layering, intensifying in colour and then fading off, drifting into something else. I like this better than whole separate things.

Dreamed that I was out by the back fence with N and a young woman who was standing in for my little sister, because she couldn't be there, and one or two others. It was night and for some reason we were watching the sky. There were thousands of stars visible. I saw a shooting star - I exclaimed and pointed but as I did I started to see dozens and then hundreds of others brightening and fizzing away into nothingness. I looked to the Southern Cross (in the dream I called it the Aurora Borealis) in time to see its stars do the same. They were gone. It was clear we were witnessing the end of our known existence, our galaxy coming to its end.

Before I could be terrified I knew I had to make sure my sister was okay. I hugged the girl as we looked at the sky and told her 'It's an incredible thing to be alive at this time, to see this.' I knew I had to find my actual sister and teach her this, wherever she was, in time for her to be okay.

And then I started repeating an exclamation of wonder - maybe 'Look at them! Just look at them!' I said it over and over until I woke up and then it echoed around keeping me awake.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Starlight Night LOOK at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!	5
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!—
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!	10
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

crying meditations:

- throat dilated and hardened into an open ring, tongue quivering free on its stalk like a baby bird tongue 

- intense sharp itch on the foot, on the neck, on the left side of the abdomen, itches layering and getting fiercer, pincers, whole body chained, hard jaw, teeth together

- hot sheets of back-ache, layer under layer, crumpling

- empty flask suddenly opening on the left hand side of the diaphragm, hard shell, filled with cold air 

- brief sharp stomach pain opening into deep jelly wobbles in a quick 2/4 rhythm

livid sun this evening, dropping below the clouds and into a last stretch of haze before the hills.

trying to write that and about the pink student halls snugged into the hills, pagoda style roofs, but distracted, that instead we were rolling back away from the sun, and the thin empty prism between the ground and clouds was now angled towards it. 

actually this afternoon there was soft sunshine for a long time through the window onto my face and the desk, where I was slowly grading, reading the poems several times, drifting away, coming back. I went to look at him in the bedroom - I knew he was asleep - curled over my pillow, holding it. 

may the early light shine upon you

His eyes were a little bit fervent tonight, saying 'I can do this too'. he offered his critique. "It's a little bit of a train of thought." Then we stepped out of the theatre onto the closed road, roadworks. the humidity so thick we were walking into a warm cloud, cotton grey on the night. no traffic anywhere. 

I dreamed that N and I moved into a large shared house, old and run-down. We took three rooms, and we were happy with how much space we had, even though the rooms were separated in the house. We moved into a different room in the middle of the night. I heard my parents shouting in the next room - turned out they were staying there on a kind of meditation retreat. The owners of the house were meditation friends of theirs. I was upset and concerned that they were disturbing the rest of the house. But the owners walked out with me to the kitchen, supportively touching my elbow, saying 'yes, it's a shame, isn't it, after all these years. They must be very attached to that pain.' They were calm and philosophical, and everything was okay. They had made rolled up bacon and egg sandwiches for breakfast - there was a large, stacked tray of them, and although this didn't specifically appeal to me I was happy because I knew N would be excited by it. 

My mother has had a baby. I'm with her, we're taking the baby home from the hospital - we're together on a sort of trike, or bicycle with side-cart. I think the baby's name is Colleen. My stepdad has not attended the birth. He's away from home for a couple of days at a music festival. It's sinking in that this is strange and wrong, that he doesn't want to bond with her in the first couple of days, thinks he can catch up later. My mother is having a psychotic break and has got off the bicycle, is wandering all over the road, shouting and waving her arms, trying to go inside a cafe. People are cautiously surrounding her; she's perhaps going to be taken back to hospital. I am looking after the baby, who is brand new and wrapped up warmly.

I CAN SEE THROUGH MY EYEBALLS

(Pina Bausch)

a white cliff of hearing water

is hearing a cliff-nest boiled in milk.

whiter the sea-mews boil in the jaws,

swim up through the hearing,

see through.

yonder a yolk, a yellow mew

falls from the sun to the milk

and we meet, climb the cliff’s veins

dry off in the clothespines

as pins in shadow, thin but holding

warm stones in hands.

pina is a blue tree. shadow.

tall, with humorous feet

that is viscous feet transducing

the wrapping arms transducing

in fingers fine hairs

on the backs of warm stones

on the backs of the root

threaded dirt, animals threading

saccade saccade the city of trees

with cinderblock city with

warm stones in hands.

one of her animal bodies
folds to the lee as a city.
another of her bodies
folds to the lee.

I seek the world's veined teapot, buried....

Samuel Ace at The Drunken Boat

demotion ("A stressed syllable may realise an offbeat when it occurs between two stressed syllables" - Derek Attridge):

Martine Bellen, Hey Diddle Diddle

hen in the berries, juice on the feathers, hooves on the dancers, cup of night. milkstream. gentle ferns on the river, trailing fingers in the river, & roots push in the mud. rain on the stems banks and dribbles. rain patter and chill. 

cysts on my intestines!
cysts on my intestines, you make me want to sleep
you make me want to cancel all my classes and drift
over playgrounds on the hot hot breeze
make me go right down in my energy right down
to the television aisle in the large appliance store
float between the channels push around on the tides
of sound sleep moving
wake sleep cruising on the crowded escalators

got nasty drugs to kill the bugs
nasty drugs to kill the bugs
amoebas stop mobbing my innards
stop cramping me in the night
& washing out my will
on a wave of shit each day

got drugs to pop you like balloons
I want my energy back

if, in the dead of night, you have to seize chickens from the higher branches of a magnolia, muffle your baby's ears and grab the rooster first. 

small baby's tongue quivering on its root - free in the air like the clapper of a bell

a blind woman in the dole office queue - the case manager says 'follow me' and walks off

five children of different ages, up for adoption together: Quinta, Quinte, Quintara, Quintare, Quintea.
"Quintara and Quintea are making progress with processing their feelings about possible adoption and have chosen not to be photographed at this time."

it's all about the flight paths at the moment. seeing out, having a view. it helps so much here, where it's so hard to be outside. view skating along the buzzing green tips of the trees where they are respiring in the light. sea apples, angsanas, rain-trees, broad-leaf mahoganies.

and after dark the campus lights, quiet and peaceful. among these sorts of pleasures I feel guilty about having requested a bigger place, so I could work easier, so we didn't kill each other, so we could have more happiness. about having air-conditioning on so our things don't mould. it niggles and nags. I don't know how to make peace with the needs of the self that actively take something from others.

U PLAY IT LIKE MICKEY GILLEY THERE HONEY

exhausted! we moved house. the new place feels huge, and so much natural light. there was almost none before. now the bedrooms look out over the tops of trees to the grass-covered roof of the love-knot. we are at the level of the flightpaths of the birds. I have my own room to work in again, first time in three years.