David Hawkins
Julie Christie’s House
A wave breaks over the mountain its corona held softly as in a mouth until the moment lapses surely there will be another before we are picked off still to notice this the time we have is repurposed Julie walking her dogs through the wave over the mountain no one sees or knows she passes in and out of the rain backlit by afterstormlight or equally it doesn’t matter dimmed among anywherewhatsoeverlight what year is it she has no special costume other than the rain screens of which come and go in terms of continuity we took the mountain road up by Trawscoed not to be near Julie Christie but to hasten the river pelting along the rocks deleterious colder air Julie knows all this and is several owlish paces ahead the dogs dispersed in wet dissolving noise Julie dispersing silent dissolves. One in the Eye for Empathy Sceptics launches a movement-utterance whose mirroring they are still doing air leaving a body at a precise exit point precisely when exit points are held in tension a cartoon hole stuck on a wall like a sticker heads duck through and tickle eternity whose lack of (a) punctum scatters disjectives through driftless regions and (b) not something soft and obvious like a hammer but a loaf of bread flying at a face: access between selves/something moving it is the whole body that speaks as if wanting to copresence as simple as a form or neat parking space in the all-or-nothing Éliane Radigue’s Triptych (1978) [some YouTube comments redacted] This is how deserts think and feel any muuuuusic wind over tundra bmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm pretty obscure? though one’s imagination can grapple LOVE #ElianeRadigue therefore we exist what humans sound like after they’ve gone after they’ve gone they’ve gone finished loading the cargo wish I had discovered this four decennia ago it goes rmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm things are the same/an artificial ocean ripples coursing through immense galaxies this is music shhhhhh drops and the mmmmm kicks in the harbour sonic think tank in succession adorando o som do silencio thank you for sharing in the imagination department sounds of the universe before the big bang good luck Freedom of the City The ad-breaks are where we long to dwell. Reports coming in from the uttermost regions indicate that groups of ad-breaks have established communes and live by principles wholly evanescent but nonetheless potent and pervasive. We’ve been planning how to abscond and join this noble struggle. Next time an ad happens we must follow the usual routine of muting the sound and looking away – that is, forcibly muting the sound without a word, and looking fiercely away in the refined style of late high nonchalance. It’s funny to know you’re at the end of something. Inhabiting a decadent mode; waiting for a key change. The last tedious gestures of a darkling apocalypse. Peristalsis. Things used to be things themselves; that was localism. Then there were the adverts for things. Now there are persistent adverts for things that do not – and never will – exist. Where might ideas be in all this? Exquisite billboard skies are detourned by fragrant ghosts. It’s sensuous. |
© Copyright David Hawkins 2019
David Hawkins is a writer, book editor and naturalist from Bristol, England. He was awarded second prize in the 2015 UK National Poetry Competition. Recent work has appeared in Blackbox Manifold, Stride, BlazeVOX and B O D Y, and is forthcoming from Arc Poetry (Canada).