SPEAKING THROUGH

In the fold of an arm something springs undone. The reversibility a focal dispersion filtering outwards on every turn. What are we facing? Where are we heading? It is a round-about presenting that inclines out of each pre-set mid-line, to incline on a falling slope or to rise up as an inclination remembered from afar rinsing through. We are not where we are supposed to be. We are the thought-of motion built out of our oaring. This is the breath and it cannot be put into a holding though it builds in the vacuum of an encounter that fast becomes its momentary expulsion.

In the smells of the distance that collect around our quivering nostrils, here is our most immediate loci tingling through the nerve-ends in our face, quivering at the edge of our eyes, peppering in the breeze, our lips.

Do we speak? Not yet. Our bellies soften and the tendons in our neck pull taught bracing the clavicle and sternum and the moveable chest plates and rib bones under which our heart resides and our lungs too, emptying and filling, emptying and filling; blood and air mixed yet separate; this transmogrification from a spectre that is no more than the brief shapes of the wind held in the core depositary of flesh and bone.

Earth and sky; this admixture held apart; a mere hairs breadth or the separation of continents across the ocean.

Where are we? Where are we going? Between one deposit and one way of mark-making and its seeming erasure; the accumulation of layers that speak through this emptiness; harmonies and incongruities, clashing and holding, affronts and dispersals that rise and fall in the crest of a wave between dissonance and the continual reverberation of our people through the ages. This is the sounding that is placeless because it is mobile. It is the meshing that creates junctures of correspondence; a recognition and deep love that is both this tension and its release.