Читать книгу Edges & Fray - Danielle Vogel - Страница 8

/

I begin to create these vessels

foraged for and pressed

into function

a book , of string and filament -- /

a vibrational object upon contact

this slim branch of text lifting the page

a thread

at the back

of the eye

/ hands

-- looms

by friction,

surface entanglement

stick-lattice --

-- grass polygon, loosely-packed ferns, a cup, a

high mud wall --

for what will you

the foraged for

impulse of arrangement . that’s all I have

that strange, entangled expanse of one’s own interiority

the ruby-

throated

hummingbird

starts its nest

with a disk

of saliva

moss . lichen

then, it’s a matter

of catching webs

vegetation / silk

the density of the loops, aerial

warping

threaded through the upper

periphery

, and then

wrap another line

or maybe the plant wool

that helps seeds disperse

on the air --

felting

a loosely thatched paragraph

// an open canopy ---

to land upon an awkward bale of noise

where I forage feeling into shape

into sound; where I am exactly

a subterranean burrow . arboreal nest . clay flask on a granite rock face . the elf owl roosting in an abandoned woodpecker hole . a dome of moss built on a cliff’s ledge . swiftlet catching nesting materials in flight . fungus garden . self-secretion is a narrative editing process . nuthatch . flycatcher . house wren . flicker . the thrush and titmouse . plant fibers and larval silk . sap and pitch . bowers and tools . mandibles to pulp prey and paper . brood cells . hawthorn . cottonwood . mesquite . birch and the birdhouse

a soft inner lining of grasses ,

pushed into a mud cup

the visible line of mud across her breast as she flies

an entire sentence crossed

/ invisibly ,

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 to sew

with its beak

a weaverbird

/ eventually,

a silken cable

conjoins two leaves

an opening

purse :

strands of sedge

and reeds

cattails on the shore

of a grassy scrub, glow

a red-winged

blackbird

low / among vertical shoots --

soaked marsh vegetation

stringy plant material

woven to gather

upright stems

a platform / /

wet leaves / decayed wood