,
through a braid
we come to language
as architects of relation --
but sentences are not secure
we take them up as planks
and make unstable geometries
a book arrives in threads --
I am never not writing . I never think : I am not a writer
some nests can only be reached through a tunnel . the belted kingfisher burrows fifteen feet into a vertical bank near fresh or salt water . the cavity littered with white fish bones and scales
to spend all that time in the total darkness of the den . the stench of it . the grooved floor of its cavity . to have the instinct to keep everything from caving in
I want a book that remembers its origins
I remind myself
not only beautiful things
happen in nests
to write a living-manuscript
so that as it fails in some of its forms
it still convulses in its architecture
a loose heap
/
of unwoven sticks
lodged in the forks of a branch --
woody vegetation balanced in the crook
the grebe builds a floating nest
a buoyant platform of rotting shrubbery
moored to surrounding plants
some books
are likewise precarious
I think of the organ-pipe wasp
who frames long mud flutes to reside within
they too are solitary . though sometimes
two females may build side by side
sharing a common wall
as it accumulates ,
sedimentary ,
/ thread by line --
, sometimes sloughing off /
sometimes not
this book then ,
weaving --
eye
a voice
crosses this voice / / crosses
nervous systems --
lace
the peripheral edge of a line
temporarily amalgamated
language’s ability
to bond ,
to create momentary enclosures
- / -- / ---
track the cellular regeneration
of a sentence --- its rhizomic
/ branchings , its
kinetic reoccurrences
an unstable boundary : the body / the book
how language inhabits a line that moves
how it exists because of this instability
\
start by making a loose ball of words
bind it with the cocoons of forest tent
caterpillars . your saliva , a sphere around the ball
filled -- with finer sounds / to line the cup
of the mouth --- feathers -- - fur , pleats of
lichen , language
to press one’s body against this curve
offer form
to the problem
-- and gift
/ of ethereality
to gestate the body as it waits
its own arrival
that secret unsayable center
I’ve watched a swallow scoop clay
with its beak / deposit the silt
against its nest
even before the bird
/
belong to both . to others
with their entire bodies
writing is the retrieval
of material ---- to produce a desired , shape
as open : archiving
the word architecture
build within the space of this thought . sound , shaped into series becomes sentence and series ,
consider environmental circumstance . consider mastication and regurgitation . consider function . consider weather . concealment . elongation . suspension and ductility .
beginning
