N.Z.R.

over a deep blue night whiteness drifts, like the loose beard of one so old the hair is mist, wisps schoaling. and you, you're a man in a fog with a train around you. you're leaning close to the window, craning at the sky, where the image of the letters in this vessel worked in coloured glass are thrown upon the cloud, all their perfect ornament thrown, their neat compression held. peacock and ruby cuts in solid air spell the sign of the abbreviated tale. woodville to dannevirke, woodville to dannevirke. there was darkness, and then we had rail. if only eusebius....  but you once walked the long way yourself. once, a hundred times, and through the ruahines, and to the coasts. once at the side of pregnant elizabeth, and on alone.

Yesterday morning I was dreaming I was with George Simcox and was considering how to get away in time to ring the bells here which as porter I had to ring, but 'Loveless circumstance' means the full impress of mechanarchy, functionalism, routine: friendship may have encouraged Stevie to introduce an element of non-naturalistic farce, as when Captain Maulay, announced by a loud crash, bounds into the room with a paper bag full of cream buns, or a German officer, his plane shot down, is fished out of the lake. Those jettisoned bodies / gazing comet-struck into / the god void / aboard the Momship - by day this is embarrassing, by night it is terrifying. Elsewhere, a woman leans over her waka, fish in one hand, breasts drooping realistically over her canoe. He seems to have become very engaged, being led astray by the ripened seed-capsule, which gapes wide on drying, to expel the dust-like seeds. He thinks it important that the specimens he sends retain their Maori customary names, whereas Hooker swiftly undresses them. He is hoping to play peekaboo with someone who comes along. More language for journeys. A crossing, a cut. The word for arrival at a destination. Suitable for all on-snow activities, and procedures to rotate the fields of language, accompanied by a certain lasciviousness - the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence. Apparitions and ghosts represent that ambiguity. That's what I want, / Said the Devil, / And threw one at him. It seems more relevant now than it did in his lifetime - a fern-green thing / from a spirit world. He had observed in old Maori culture that nearly everything was to a degree animate and full of spirits. This deepened his gloom, from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of the branches up to the tops of the timber. All possible voices were united, and then only through the 'thisness' of each object. He and the other novices had just come before the novice-master again to ask for 'little leaves' to keep such things as a watch, razor, pocket knife or scissors. The power of such absence is the chill it casts. It can only be read as something not yet made. But the whole of a man's movable property is his own, which includes his house and fences, as well as all his smaller goods, so New Zealanders prefer to live in a type of self-imposed anaesthesia. Lucky lucky. Listen! Listen! As if the tongue told & tolled. This further alludes to the nose - the proboscis - and its homophone “knows.” I had nothing in mind. The struggles of babies. TB. Sophie -> 0482 066077- Nipple pain -Feed/sleep signals - Pumping - when? How can you be hungry while I live in this city? I cannot endure this. The smaller the quantity of dead wood in your fence, the less does it hurt the sight. This pressure of cultural selection probably explains the second branching of the tree, where clues are present, but serve no real function. There too, perched in the tree or tied to the battleground by white tendrils of memory, are all the memorialists and decorators of the primal myth. 

Gerald Manley Hopkins, The Major Works 199
Robert Graves, Poetic Craft and Principle 125
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory
Frances Spalding, Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography 173
Wanda Coleman, Bath Water Wine 165
Landfall 229 49, 38
Leicester Kyle, Koroneho 110
Peter Wells, The Hungry Heart: Journeys with William Colenso 365
Two journals
Aldi catalogue
Little Duck Finger Puppet Book
Michael Nardone, "Listen! Listen! Listen!: Jackson Mac Low's Phonopoetics
https://www.academia.edu/12050628/Listen_Listen_Listen_Jackson_Mac_Lows_Phonopoetics
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves 185
Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand 230
The Arabian Nights, tr Husain Haddawy 349
John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare 1730-1840 83
Franco Moretti,  Graphs, Maps, Trees 72
Rachel Loden, Kulchur Girl
Jack Ross, "Leicester Kyle" http://jacket2.org/content/leicester-kyle
Leicester Kyle, Heteropholis http://leicesterkyle1.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/heteropholis-1998.html
Leicester Kyle, Options
Paul Mariani, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=HWNDAGOUN6QC&pg=PA86&lpg=PA86&dq=gerard+manley+hopkins+george+simcox&source=bl&ots=h-NFR-UYwq&sig=ws76gnYhr8c-KpapLrgbeZNCL78&hl=en&sa=X&ei=AZlUVbHNBovm8gWfi4G4Cw&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=gerard%20manley%20hopkins%20george%20simcox&f=false
Roopika Risam, "The Poetry of Unexecutable Code". http://jacket2.org/commentary/poetry-unexecutable-code
Peter Wells "Colenso: On how trees can save us and keep us sane"
http://www.colensostudy.id.au/Newsletters/newsletter%20June11.pdf
Wikipedia,  "Gerard Manley Hopkins"
The Victorian Web, "Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Brief Biography"
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hopkins/hopkins1.html
The Victorian Web, "Hopkins on Inscape and Instress"
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hopkins/hopkins1.html
The Poetry Foundation, "Gerard Manley Hopkins"
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gerard-manley-hopkins
Facebook
William Colenso, "On the Maori Races of New Zealand"
http://rsnz.natlib.govt.nz/volume/rsnz_01/rsnz_01_00_002210.html
Annie Potts, Philip Armstrong, Deirdre Brown, A New Zealand Book of Beasts: Animals in our Culture, History and Everyday Life
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=vuhaAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA16&lpg=PA16&dq=%27the+maori+races+of+new+zealand%27+colenso&source=bl&ots=6kL8RbpJ0b&sig=fIbFnV4fXcWe6xv3-po0B4Hlte4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=OX9VVfnjBIPdmAXql4HwDQ&ved=0CEEQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q='the%20maori%20races%20of%20new%20zealand'%20colenso&f=false
The New Yorker, Joan Didion, "Last Words" precis
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/11/09/last-words-6
Adrienne LaFrance, "Why's this so good? No. 79. Joan Didion, Hemingway, and Mathematically Musical Writing. http://nieman.harvard.edu/stories/whys-this-so-good-no-79-joan-didion-hemingway-and-mathematically-musical-writing/

I'm not sure what that thing is when you meet someone whose spirit is being keelhauled. Like I gave him a lift, but turned around in the car to watch what he was doing with his hands. Or, when he came in for supervision I checked his visible skin for tracks. And when I saw them at last wondered who I should tell. I am a witness, who would like my report? This is the eighth unwritten notebook, and not yet the ugliest. Young boys in the corner of the public spa, huddled together over a plastic bag. Beggars who came home and stashed their signs in the kitchen, then went upstairs for the deal. A woman asleep face down under the feijoa tree. A woman six months pregnant with scarcely a bump. A woman with florid movements. A dropped note in the hall: They are watching me, be careful, they are watching you too. But I am a witness, who should I tell? Is there somewhere to hand in this note? 

We were out on what I suppose was a verandah, but the whole house was bamboo except for a set of hardwood stilts, so I don't know if the same word applies. The elephants were tied to the stilts, one for each house, but our elephant was not the angry one, so it wasn't going to pull at the stilts and tip up our house. Maybe they weren't called stilts. Maybe they weren't called houses. Anyway I couldn't actually see the other houses from that verandah, or the other elephants.  Just trees and vines coming from underneath and going up to cover the sky, like we were in a ball of trees and vines, floating on the brown bamboo. There were noodles for lunch, but I'm not sure it was lunchtime. It was food. The noodles were hard, they came out of a yellow packet, and then they went soft in boiling water, right there in the plate. They were called Myami, it was written on the packet. Like 'mummy' and like 'yummy'. That seemed like nothing and something together. Like random and a really big coincidence  and not a coincidence at all. Are different languages the same in some of their places but not in others? If you pay attention can you find the places? John gave us journals and we had to write in them. They were yellow. The writing on the cover looked like decoration curled back around floating commas. But I didn't know what to write. But we weren't going anywhere till the writing was done. But I didn't have anything to write. Well that was unbelievable. After everything that was just really unbelievable. 

I dreamed I was in a house - a large house with numerous people, like a party was going on, or it was a communal house. There was a bathroom and a bath. My mother was somewhere in the house with another woman.

I had a baby but it was very tiny, very fragile, see-through. I was trying to care for it, I should be able to care for it. it was just a couple of centimetres long. As I held it its head flopped back, right back. I tried to right it but caused more damage. Could it really survive this? The baby was losing its shape entirely. Was it already dead? There was something on its little see-through cheeks and I tried to clean them, but damaged the cheeks. The skin tore and the baby erupted into a bubble of blood. It was destroyed.

I had been trying to communicate my worry and distress to my mother and the woman she was talking to but they weren't interested. Now I erupted into wails and screams, needing to siren this horror, the death, the loss.  

phases

fraying: your arms and body jerk, the skin around your eyes turns pink.

softening: the pink moves off quick as a sunset and your arms go still, your eyes are blue glass, you stare, your breath is even for a moment or three.

then the great surge: the time for crossing's coming, you must be ready, you must fill your belly and your mouth and your cells so you suck and suck and suck the world's food in. 

the thrashing: it's not enough, it's too much. just as you are preparing you are already gone, caught out there in the open with nothing, and as you find yourself there you are here preparing too heavy a load, struggling it out to where you are already caught, in the open, with nothing.

the surface: it is just a bedroom, just a bed, and a mother holding you in a small suburban dark. open your eyes, awake as ever; see it is so and close them.

elsewhere: a lake appears after a desert's brief rain. the living know. flock follows flock and herd follows herd in arriving, partaking, lifting away in sheets

the version as unrevolutionary act

as chekhov well knew, a whelk that is attached to the wall in the first verse must remain attached to the wall in the last verse, and indeed, even after the poem is over and the embers are burning down, the whelk should be left to its own devices - commonly, sliding from one edge to another in last search of the lost ocean, or fixed in place, turning inwardly on the waves of its loss. under no circumstances should one try to fire the whelk; though it may turn it is not a revolver, and though some species of snail may shoot the dribbling darts of love, the whelk (in the right environment) reproduces by internal fertilisation. where an uncle is present he should not be allowed to cross to the hearth to finger the spiral; his translations are no help.