Sometimes when working on something I get stuck profoundly on something that insists on being there, apparently the way it is, yet it is nonsensical, incomplete, unfinishable, unworkable. none of the words will allow to be changed and it feels like a profound wrong to delete them. for example, a poem of ten pages or so founders on the image of a couple in the courtyard of an abandoned house, embracing in suncream, in a day's intense heat. the image is glanced at in a few words which do not convey. I don't know who they are to the poem or why they are there; I have to assume they have a role but I can't see what it is, or why it is so insistent. if I expand upon them they become a kind of ur-couple who take over in a way I can't live with. If I delete them I feel lost, the poem loses its anchor and floats away from me.

the couple are indulging in an escape. they belong to a world which doesn't recognise the abandoned house; their presence is an indulgence and an intrusion - they have no permission.

And what am I doing here? with that couple that won't articulate itself. they had something to say:

caught in a crumbling courtyard, in love.

their telescope body, expanding its creamy bows

his standing is a gate, hers outlines a slipper. this is what they say to each other, but who are they? they are too mysterious

dreamed that a long critique of my work with others' work was published in the Auckland Society of Authors newsletter. Written by one of the NZIBX folks (JRJ? the former nun?). It was about 15 pages long and as I read my embarrassment/dread/anger turned into realisation that this was all about positioning, and who I was affiliated with, and my work hadn't been read at all. And then I started assembling an argument and was really looking forward to answering the critique (the dream was LONG and I was going through each part methodically) - and was disappointed to wake up. 

watch-glass nails

muppet & spoon

ornitorrinco

An apology for a family transgression - a layer towards the bottom is more settled, less fractious.

And eruptions at the top, plates shifting beyond me.

the next task is to order and read the ms. I may just stay home tomorrow to do that. I don't want to  do it without time.

and then, to ask PB about VB or not? hatred of a request for a favour, undeserved, in the pattern of rejection. 

So therefore, where have I been in this poem, in this book? as a record of a journey. The idea of a mihi, a formal welcoming, that each of these in as much as they deal with loss is also accepting that a new way of life is coming, unknown. working this into the body so it's known that it's not an error. 

I feel fucking terrible about starting to write today. But I am taking myself through my emergency writing steps anyway. I have headphones and music, and two hours on the selfcontrol app started. the source of the terrible - having the feeling of Starting Work tomorrow and the pressure on the time, like everything is banked up behind the wall, and the pressure to attend to all that, a sense of anger from the other about what I haven't already done. A "WHY HAVEN'T YOU DONE THE DISHES" feeling. Which is not trivial because it was threatening and constant and overrode my needs and preferences all the time. Or maybe not all the time but there was no negotiating? And what I needed was undefined, and no kind of priority at all.

Anyway, I am taking myself through these steps. have music, headphones, time will stretch. There are dreams.

Last night I dreamed I was in the water - the sea, a large bay, with Mum and Cathy. There's a really strong current sweeping us fast in a direction which may be beyond where we want to go. I think I've dreamed about this water & coastline before. There are multiple bays, islands, it's quite pleasant but there are the dangers of being in the water to negotiate. Swimming out of the current to the land. This was the plan, and I'm not sure if I have the strength, if this is too big an ask.

There's another section to the dream. Getting out of the water onto a pier, this place is Japanese, we are in a museum? A row of artefacts in the centre of a room. A very weathered beam - or is this the pier?

To be in the cultivation of a dream life, which is more important than the poetry. This feels like a really core piece of the puzzle. I want Martha to understand its importance. And in that, finishing this book is not the same significance. It is not INsignificant. It is just not the 'end' of all. And my accountability is not in having it published, but in developing this life.

a dream in which a man and a woman are crouched, face-down in shallow water. I/the woman stands up, and immediately begins labour.

the water was in a stone room, ancient and quite dark. the labour is very active, powerful, almost angry. 

other than that I feel stuck, 'blocked' tonight; maybe a symptom of having just done marking which was finished today. part of it is actually a little different to what the word block suggests - it's like charge through me every time I see another art work or *something* that i approve  of - a movie title, a photo a line, something. 

very hungry to do some kind of collage, and for the patterns in asemic writing.

and thinking I would like to submit the ms to Vagabond Press, seems like the right place. 

There was another dream, about curtains. I was in an apartment in a new city (visiting or staying) with my partner, who was black, and our young child. The apartment was large and borrowed or rented from people we knew. It was positioned over a large complex of public swimming pools. Our kid wanted to go swimming and I had promised that he could - but as I was looking out the window it seemed like there were few people down there - I wondered whether the pool was closing at 3pm, and it was nearly 3 now. Still I felt we would take the boy swimming somewhere. Meanwhile we were going through the rooms, talking about how we'd replace the curtains, and the expense to get the place looking presentable. The end room was messy but I said if we tidied it up and made the bed it would look fine, with its existing yellow curtains. Not our style but I didn't need to use that room (it was allocated to me), because I already had a study elsewhere in the apartment. We made the bed and it looked good - see? I had a phone call with the apartment owner, a kind of shallow, perky woman, explaining what we would do.

There was a sadness about this dream, the guy I was with, who somehow felt broken. I loved him but he was weary with everything he had been through just from being a black man.

*

This is mysterious and I'm not sure where to start with it. The new life coming. Reserves - that we have limited resources to play with immediately, but that we have (and I have) things in reserve. 

I dreamed that we were at Douglas Rd, and Mum was saying "untastic!" or "unfantastic!" to me. What? "Untastic!"
I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Turned out she had been asking me to fetch her books to read (I hadn't heard her/been listening), and she didn't want fantasy novels. I was going through all my books on the dining table, and looking for things I wanted to share with her. I put together a set of non-fiction things that I really liked about masculinity, the history of masculinity in NZ and related things. There was one book I liked so much that I had two copies of it, one 'good' and one for giving away. I wanted to give her the unblemished one, as a gift. But it seemed that one was already well-thumbed and I had already turned up all the bottom corners of the other one, marking all the passages that were about men and landscape, as a my own research interest.

But then the overall feeling in giving these to her was that she wasn't that interested anyway - they weren't what she was interested in reading.

*

I feel like this is in the space of the last dreams. But with the distant/disinterested mother again. The excitement about books is still located in me. And the mother's disinterest is isolating me, taking away the value and energy in what I want to communicate. 

Dreamed that I was in the Patea house, my grandma's house, staying there during a literary festival. With other writers there - Tony Green, John Scott. There was a young woman on the tv who had been featured that day at the festival - dynamic and very different and interesting. I'd already bought her book, it was on the table, and I was a bit proud of this because it somehow reversed my slackness and disengagement. I said 'oh I have her book here if anyone wants to have a read'. But the others said no - that they didn't like to read while they were writing their own work, for the purposes of focus. I was surprised again to find myself on the other side of this signal of 'goodness' and application, and to find it wasn't necessary, but still, I wanted to read the woman's book. I began dipping into a chapter, and it was incredibly rich and engaging -

it was in the first person, so it became the dream, where the writer and I were simultaneous. A recount of her memories of her nanny, who had four large, full breasts. She could remember being breastfed, this extraordinary unlimited experience of plenty. There was a question of whether the nanny was black, a figure of exploitation. There was a question of whether the writer could really remember this far back, but possibly (because of her class status and the period of her upbringing) she had been nursed by the nanny from infancy well into her childhood - 7, 8, 9 years of age. I buried down into the nanny's shirt and found a breast in all that fullness. I had not yet found a nipple to latch on to but the satisfaction was huge.

*

following the dream I was able to write yesterday and got quite a bit done, with a feeling of casualness, entitlement, laziness, freedom. This dream and the classroom dream have the same odd feeling to them, of reversing the rules and requirements of my creative work in a way that doesn’t feel credible but is really gratifying in the dream. And in this one (actually in both of them) my resistance is outsourced to some authority and legitimised, leaving me free to engage and be fed and satisfied but in ways that feel suspiciously privileged. 

I wonder - why four breasts? why did the breast I  suckled have no nipple? and what about the movement into the book?

at 11 weeks when things were tenuous I thought I felt the baby feeling me, aware of me, and sometimes when I surged with awareness of it, it surged back on those currents.

now I feel like he's tucked in a needed unconsciousness. I know he's alive because we've needed so many scans, but I don't feel his awareness, or I feel like it is wrapped around his own growing, where it needs to be.

saying 'he' still feels like a slight aggression at this stage. it is fun for us and it lays out some sort of hazy movie for a future but he's still an it, unburdened by personhood or gender, not needing any appearance. except the appearances which tell us he is alive and growing. is that an intrusion?

into my own willingness to be open to the fortune of death, to sail with it again.

precipitous is that day of digesting and wishing for the sleep that turned into diggers

you're stretching me out

or I'm bleeding around you wee baby I can't tell

just bloating

bodiness

I'm going nuts. Eating is a HUGE DEAL, it exhausts me. Bleeding again overnight the last couple of nights. so tired and tearful. I read a bunch of stuff on SCH and it helped sort of then I think it overwhelmed and upset me, that this could go on and on, that it could cause later problems. 

moss eats canvas, fire ants crabs land crabs blue crabs to

crawl up a rope because I love you

a nature poem,  boring for an island which might die crossing a hot  road

and vulnerable christmas children (they bite their shells)

sometimes you do find being in groups is difficult 

against the fence in the sun 

and not much shelter or school crawling up a rope

well we love us so I changed then you changed then I changed 

but it's not a chase anymore it's more like oh, you're here, we are

there's something about - how do I get from the abandonment to the chase? they're not the same
or the plenitude of the weed species while keeping the loss

I dreamed that I caught a bus or a tram up a steep hairpin hill, rather lovely floral setting, touristic like Japan or Switzerland and the vehicle was crowded - I only meant to go up a stop or two but there were no stops, I had  to go all the way. Trying to lift Nic's indistinct black bag off as well as my ownand managing it at the last minute.  Something about Dolly Parton, she was up there, suited the setting well. It was a university residence?

I dreamed last night that I was in an English lit class - a senior high school class - run by Neil. I had been coming to classes very erratically, I was preoccupied with other things, and actually felt like the work was boring, I couldn't concentrate, couldn't get engaged. I came to class late one day and it was after a test that I'd done with the others. I thought I wasn't going to pass because I really wasn't doing the work. I came into the classroom and was very surprised to see my test response, which I'd done as visual art, blown up very large and displayed on the walls of the classroom. It was a collage or collages of swans or flamingoes with long snaky necks, arranged in repeated images so the pattern of the lines was dominant, with a really eerie but beautiful background. I'd done them in soft colour, black and white with soft pink but they were copied only in black and white, multiple huge copies around the classroom with other students' works smaller. They still looked good in black and white. The other kids were saying the teacher had put them up because they were the best test response. I was shocked because I hadn't been a good student but it turned out I was able to do them because I was disengaged from the classwork and readings, was able to do my own thing and come in at a tangent.

I want to write, but there is something about coming here and there is nobody here, no one to read - I want to talk to someone sympatico, I suppose, where there suddenly just are things to say, and a tone or mood of speaking that makes everything all right, that is like a river going on and on, with its steady lack of intention.

The nausea seems to be lifting, day by day. Baby so much bigger in the scan today. And not bouncing, just waving arms and legs around like seaweed in current.

For a month or more it's been periodic bouts of bleeding, and trips to the doctor or hospital about twice a week for checks and scans and shots. Thank god for insurance but my cover will run out sometime.

Right now there's a thirteen week foetus, growing. It looks peaceful in the still photos. It has its ankles crossed, thin legs against the wall, and there's a shadow like the eyelash line across the eye. In the active scans, though, it's quite busy. It flexes its back sharply and jerks and bounces like a bean. It moves its thin arms up to its head and down again. An almost invisible hand goes to the mouth, as though it's sucking its thumb. Once I saw it turn its head away from the scanner and back again. Its heart beats fast, at about double the rate of mine.

Next to the amniotic sac, against a thin line of chorion that seems, in places, to fade into nothing, is a dark mass. That's the sub-chorionic bleed. It was about 6.5 x 4.5 x 2cm at last measure, and it curves around the chorion like an embrace. It's the other life I'm carrying: the life of a possible miscarriage, instead of a baby.

I take hormone tablets and I sleep a lot. If I don't remember to eat all the time, or can't summon the will, I start to retch and gag and get dizzy. Once I've eaten I retch and try not to throw up, and my insides ache as though I'm digesting a whole crocodile. I'm on leave; I don't work beyond the occasional email, don't read anything except news on the internet, I don't write and I don't think.

The other day my hip seized up and I had a couple of days of intense pain, from above my sacrum to my left knee, that made me feel sick. So I gingerly, gingerly tried to stretch things out. Scared to move the wrong way and maybe break that line of chorion. Eyes closed and focusing very closely on the muscles and the space, what felt okay and was relieving the pain, not going close to anything that might be too much. It worked and the pain's mostly gone, I'm okay now.

Around the 11 week mark, at a very risky time, I thought I was feeling the baby move. I was sure of it. Now I don't feel that, though I know everything's okay for now in there. I don't know if I was right about the feeling, but it felt like contact. Now it feels like the growing work is all necessarily unconscious, happening in inevitability and full absorption. 

There was a tree with a branch hanging low. it was sort of broken off at the end. I climbed up it and found myself in the heart of the tree. ants, dirt, view, I didn't spend very long there, maybe it was exploratory or maybe I didn't feel much but came back down again, and felt pleased that I had managed that. It seemed special. Neil and Dermot were coming along the road, and Neil invited me to that evening's events with Dermot. As we walked along I had nothing to contribute to their conversation and was silent, not knowing the writers they were talking about. I realised that the tree access was normal and expected for them, not special, and many others did it habitually and proficiently.

We got to the house where we were spending the evening and I went to the kitchen for something - I don't think I was expecting dinner but Dermot's wife (actually Derek's wife) said "Oh, you're not included in the dinner."

So I went away, to another room, which was mine - in the same house, but actually somehow in a rented flat, shared student flat. There was a piano in the room and bits of vegetables/ sushi or snacks out that I could nibble on. Nothing like 'dinner' but enough for me. 

after I spewed last night N said - I'd like to invent a knitted tunnel, which goes from the end of the bed to the toilet, getting progressively narrower. So when you have morning sickness you can just crawl through there to the toilet and pop your head out at the end and be all snuggy while you throw up. 

I was packing up all our possessions into backpacks for a long trek across country - a migration, because our home was no longer viable. There were too many things, and I couldn't imagine how I would carry them all, but I did keep finding small efficiencies to help - a spot within a pack for the sleeping bag, so I didn't have to carry it separately, and so on. I was mad with N for having so much fussy stuff and so many bags, and that he wasn't there helping. I looked around for him and saw he was playing something called 'Game of Thrones' - a kind of betting game involving a throne- he was trying to get me to calm down and not worry about this, because he had a chance of winning and this was going to help us.

In the next scene I was walking down a town street with GCK, and we stopped at a bar. She started cutting a piece out of the paper menu with a box cutter- her oddness, I thought it was a very G thing to do, inexplicable and disruptive but necessary for her. But the bar owner was watching and there was nothing I could do by then to stop her. He was very angry, so I offered to just pay the replacement cost of the menu, which he said was $30. I gave him a $50 because it was all I had, and he walked off with it, with no intention to give me change. I thought about letting it go but because we were now homeless I knew I had to go into the bar to demand the change. I explained to him - I have nothing, I don't have a home or food, I need the $20 back, it's right, it's what you owe me. He said something like 'I do what I want to, not what I'm told to', while shoving me against a wall, and then the dream became erotic. 

We went to the doctor again, got another scan another bloodtest. There on the scan the little dark dot, making its first appearance. Yolk sac, amniotic sac. There it is. And the tests came back good - a nice rise in the HCG since Friday. Despite the spotting that hints something may not be right, it looks like things are all right.

I still have the two futures inside me, that will continue. But I feel a bit easier.

And then Dermot has died. I remember each of the things he said, each like a cutting still waiting to be planted. There's not so much time. 

That most of what is being made now is a cosy home, a down. Something is growing but it is very tiny. If it's not right it will pass through at the right time. A full, intricate, intimate and barely perceptible conversation is taking place between that tiny entity and the world it's held in - like an orchestra in two parts, working back and forth in hormones and enzymes and thickening blood. They are responding to one another. But it seems that if the embryo dies, it might take days before my body knows? Or my body will know, and wind the hormones down slowly. Let it pass through at the right time, without violence.

It's me who doesn't know. The me who isn't the body, and can only pretend to be the body. My conscious brain doesn't know any more about this than my ear or foot. I see a little bit of blood on the paper. It could mean anything at all.

I knew this guy who was almost unbearably kind and gentle. When his family cat sickened, he waited till everyone was at work and school, and then took it to the vet to be put down. He brought the body home, and curled it up on the end of a bed, then told his family that it had died peacefully in its sleep. He had lots of secrets, and a life-threatening heart condition. 

When I think about the little one inside, and whether it's okay or not, it doesn't make much sense. I feel different but it's ME that feels different. I can't feel anything in there or connect with anything separate. But thinking about it a bit more that is the truth of it. There is nothing in there yet that is separate from me. I feel the making, and that is me, and it's undistinguished from the life that isn't an other. 

Back to the doctor today - bloodtest, and then bloodtest on Monday too. In my head I imagine an obstetrician's having at most half a dozen women in the waiting room, but there are a dozen doctors at the practice, and so there are mazes of corridors and waiting rooms everywhere, all thrumming with nurses and administrators and patients.

I wonder what percentage of patients come out with bad news. Ten percent? Twenty-five? It must be normal for the doctors and nurses, at any rate. My doctor looks like a quoll, or a dunnart. She often has empty afternoons, and sometimes she seems out of her depth, or like she feels guilty. 

Suddenly the Ministry puts a freeze on all our hires in progress, and everyone's caught in limbo. Someone's turned down - 'the Ministry strongly recommends that this hire does not proceed' - for no known reason, and no face or name is attached to this judgement - it comes through a long, long tunnel of administrators, each of whom is empty. Each of the people who passes on this message erases the details of their predecessor.

But the one turned down at least knows where he stands. If he's lucky, someone has told him the content of the message. Others are told no message, no decision. Just that what had seemed simple and certain is no longer simple and certain. The promised contract, thought to be imminent, has not yet been approved. Please do not book your ticket until we have confirmed its approval. You must wait. Weeks go by, and months. The promised start date approaches. You must wait. Your previous contract expires. Your lease expires. The promised start date passes. You must wait.

It's impossible not to wonder. Who did I offend? Was it me, or my department, or a series of faults in those we meant to hire? This one showed interest in the idea of propaganda. That one is a former citizen, and they say once you've left, sometimes you can't come back. Or is it a new policy, a shift in the wind or in the bases of money? Did the message begin with a disgruntled senior minister, or a confused and incompetent junior clerk?

Communication should only be passed through your immediate superior, or better, the administrators that flank him or her. It's preferred that you don't attempt to contact anyone else. This helps to prevent confusion.Your immediate superior reminds you that nothing can be done.

I think when a baby starts to come into being it comes in like a fireball. sometimes you feel happy but mostly it's anger and fear - that there's not enough money or love, that the world is a dying shithole, that the baby is not okay and could die or be very sick. all of it's true but that's just fuel, I think, and the burning flame is the agony of death-in-reverse, life igniting at the core right now. A woman feels this right out to her skin and yells at her husband and her boss, which is 'hormones'.

I miss you, Sable Cure. Among the missing, you, the little tweak or nag of unformed wish, just to see the day here. You're like one of those binocular sets on a hill. So I put a coin in and open the lenses.

Today I talked to a former clerk of a House of Commons, and we helped to plant a nutmeg tree. I've met him before, he's so kind. Putting the glass of chardonnay down on the metal drain grid to applaud softly. Damp armpits all around. The way people toss their heads with a bit of panic when they are just TOO hot. He said he misses the fun, the intrigue.

The future's been swinging around wildly. A door's opened in the trap. It's wonderful news.

Adult women who've never held or moved a spade. I remember that feeling from childhood - wrists flailing and the blade skimming off the pile of dirt, scattering it at weird angles.