#4 Gardens in my mind
& Poems from my garden to yours
I now write from a small room in Devon. The walls are whitewashed brick and I have a basin in one corner, which means I can brush my teeth and wash my underwear and fill my water-glass in a gloss of solitude.
My window overlooks a medieval building called the Old Postern and a sunny orchard which is also a herb garden. It’s growing thick with plants that have seeded and rooted their way in from the woods, hedgerows and river banks. It looks like it really needs to be weeded and cut back. But the fact that all the herbs and trees are growing happily, the fact that the birds give me mad exaltation from dawn til dusk, the fact that shrews rummage around in the brush, and insects pepper the air, gives me pause. The clumps of stinging nettles look so wrong, I want them gone, but interspersed in-between them, and matted throughout them, are other wild spaces and species.
I guess tidying places up (whether its my bedroom, a kitchen, or a garden) can become a bit of an (entwined) aesthetic and emotional obsession for me. Like sometimes it’s more the streamlining and editing of my spaces that produces a sense of calm than the specific content alteration. & Sometimes the space just gets thinner rather than nicer with my engagement. I’m trying to loosen myself from the mechanism of pure tidying and think more about the decisions I’m making as I work, edit and cultivate. What do I think belongs around me and why?
What really concerns me is that I think the same thing could be said for my mind. I have a (similar) tendency to spend a lot of energy making sure I’ve tidied up my thoughts, edited my personal narrative, matched up my emotions to reasons and my actions to emotions, without always learning a whole lot in the process. I’m not saying that I think being reflective (or being tidy) is bad, but that when I rely too heavily on habit, I risk cutting out a lot of uncatagorisable mushy stuff in the process. Good mushy stuff. Thoughts that initially look wrong but end up having much more going on in them than I realise, at first lick.
Something about the green mesh of mixed spring growth outside my window feels abundant… in secrets, in unpredictable life forms, in stuff I have not yet seen, or said. By ‘mixed’, I think I mean part chosen (herb and apple tree) and part unselected, undefined, myriad.
I’m sitting here eating a biscuit and I’m deciding to share with you the collection of poems that I’ve spent this past winter working on. Poems are like mixed weeds in my brain, they are my internal unsolicited biodiversity, they resist a purely mechanistic way of gardening, the ‘tidying techniques’ of my mind, they require me to think about what I’m saying and make new decisions about why I want to intervene, streamline, edit.
(If you are reading this on your phone plz turn it sideways… like landscape… to get the format of the poems as I have intended)
I Smell Work Love
Saxifraga
when conditions are tipped in
favour of the flowering shrubs on
the mountainside they start to
reach further up the slope
they start to break rocks and foil
past austerity something
about the angle of the sun
something about a shadow
from the wind roots
burst into roots which push
into stems and flowers
flower into flower when
in this kind of material
dream
Crop
After Lily Clarke
The spot of blood I saw on the field won’t forget itself Lily
it was a poppy and now it is a word & I am aware of it even
in the night when we couldn’t quite see that the moon was electric
its dusty eyelid had slipped so low its flint its gold thumbnail
it’s become so dark on the page & dark in the meadow
& I’ve started to relate to the thunder I’ve started to remember
the crop of blood on my leg (inner thigh) & I’ve started to relate to what
I put on the counter what I have to dismember vegetables for meals
like the word of a lover lost the poppy asserts itself be fruit to me flower
do not add eat outside the moon starts to shake
the clouds from the sky trying to separate language from live flesh
so I try instead so I pick up the knife
and roll the melon back onto the board again yes it is an undertaking
to prepare this to be prepared to forcibly discard the idea
of melon or the distant idea of a flower becoming only in blood
which reminds itself only of senses that slip by
surrendering a field of things it cannot be
until all the longing left is harvestability
Summer
I’ve got so tired
my skin is snapping
at one cent a cell
flowers are
freight for language
sentences spill off like petals
and sense sticks to air like pollen
and at least I know that water
brings me comfort and
how to bundle up an hour
by tying down its corners
yeah I can shove an extra
twenty minutes in
at the last punch
the bottom of my back
is a numb firestorm
and I know how many hours
I can weed before I bleed
my brain out I know
how to work the season
till the die back and
best how to stuff
summer into money
December
& now out of the morning
a bucket scrapes the gravel or
is it a shovel or actually hands is it
hands making that terrible noise
against the concrete and the stones?
reminding us that we must tear at
something in order to survive a signal
that most of us must rise and tear at
something or scrape our bodies against
the earth/or worse the world’s hardest surfaces
for a chance to ask, really, gasp really
will I be imprinted with a sleeve of
software into one of those swivel chairs
I feel like I’m moulding slowly
dry spoiling in my own flesh
as I sit here and slide out death
longhand with the sweat of our industry
it pure suffocates me, it’s disgustingly crisp
clean and perfect so bland and satisfying
when it clicks into place
A discursive meditation on being disinterested
After Anthony Anaxagorou
of when it slips, attention
ate the pillars of me remembering to listen to you
man with your blue keep cup, I remember
when I wondered who in the world would walk through that door
when hello held such a mysterious edge of
the counter always feels hard on the morning shift
the skin on my hands is pulp
and my bones so close to the vibrating steel
of the espresso machine cleanness is the only thing
I can concentrate on today it is sunny, today it is rainy, today the
plates dig into my joints, and wrench at my youth
full body of referendum, and election and virus and
I’ve got bits now
I repeat myself a lot
keeps me calm or blank
makes me feel sick
and I’m unreceptive
to bits blasted at me,
food scraps or milk spit,
everything smells half-way like froth and coffee
and there’s no end to social anxiety
except, I think I left mine
somewhere, I think it got scraped into the bin
by accident with somebody’s bus pass
and they were indignant we hadn’t care
enough to notice. I tried to explain with customer service
that the care was lost too very unfortunately with the bus pass
and we were doing everything we could to find it.
Pockets
After Emma Jones
Decorate your placard of mourning I’m eight ghosts behind you now and if I performed? what was the difference I’ve duplicated now I’ve become a part of that which aligns with a more digestible vision. It was a silent rendering. Morning never arrived, there was just the burial of tomorrow, I see it now, the day is all there is: stolid and rank with everything I know about it. Careful little shrew, you just bit a hole in the corner pocket of my bedroom. It’s good to feel the air in there, my god. The way a cool finger touches my side belly. I am stilled. I want this change, the opening up of it, to last forever. Girl, I have taken you in a thousand times and my body has ripped in bearing how you separate me from myself. Dimmer the dream. Pull it right down from definition into the loose lesson of sight and let it melt there in a place you have to be reminded of because the days will avoid these pockets these pockets will keep you alive.
When will I move out my parents’ house?
Cold duct tape holding down the carpet dog
in the crate small brown stain beneath the oven
Mum balled up at the table and adult siblings make meals no
splashboard food-stained paint dad comes in at ten and takes
two clasped plates one
overturned one containing
over to the microwave then
eats in the night and falls
asleep with his kindle
and the telly turned up
bedroom equals haven garden equals dirt (and dog
shit) the summer is too hot, the winter is a routine campaign
for couch space and it’s the house of all houses which traps me in almost thirty
types of unsuccessfulness here is the plastic boat in the garage, I used to take it down to the coast and sail it around, a fucking relic of my life, how beautiful, how absolutely beautiful that is
Veranda
Leopard print sun spots under eyelids
trucks and birds and dogs bark in equal
pendulum
and further in is a
family geology a thousand beat story
a tank tide of loving the done wind
wanting
more so
I swim through mind drenched falls
& lift the thin orange lids up which
means letting everything in go out
and I can hear the creak of her sit
opposite ready for the fight
face sun if only there was more
done by the heat of it let’s
have a chemical alteration I no longer
want to be soft meat
face sun done with the heat
done face under the weak warm
ready
A poem from memory
with a line from Ilya Kaminsky
I see her window open in the rain
letting the animalness of the garden
come in no through breeze just
an invisible push where the window
should be which is wetter? the hot
sweat of the kitchen or the breath of
mud and trees which is nicer?
my small body or the spring onions in
the steam I can smell both I can smell it all
I can smell the curled mouse gone over
there I can smell another child running
down the stairs I can smell laundry
I can see her
window open in the rain
I can see her
window opening the rain
Active Solace
with another line from Ilya Kaminsky
I draw an axis through the afternoon and slip into the wind
where the buildings give way, it’s a hard flood, it scrubs me out
I see watery clouds
I see tiny massive swans, I see runners, I see the corner where
I kissed girls in the dark and I see the bus stop, the dogs, I know
none of it will feel nice, I don’t want to be in the wind no
see I want to be reminded of how I understand discomfort
because hearsay I might work out relief
untitled
as if all the junk around us
got aerified and squeezed
through eighty tubes
eighty tubes in grids all
about us angled every
which way I would
describe the wind
Dog with a stress disposition
They used to say they wanted to train her to make it easier for the whole family, but I think they changed their minds, I think it became more about wanting to make her feel good, work the stress out of her small heart. Because when she didn’t know what to do she would sit, and sit, and then start to tremble and eventually she'd throw up. It was in these moments that they all saw a piece of themself in her and wanted to do the dog training, and the discipline, so that she would be ok
Boyfriends
Don’t you just love the way it sounds
my boyfriend oh, my boyfriend?
he’s an investigative journalist uh!
my boyfriend had a pasta salad for lunch
I think my boyfriend would prefer it if we
came later on in the evening, say 8?
My boyfriend literally doesn’t give a shit
My boyfriend stuck his fingers
into my body and now I can feel them
there every day
hurts like hell
Bottleneck
She melted her body today
and tried to form it into the shape
of nine more hours in controlled task
force of nature she is, we are
impressed she’s almost possessed
by fear she is almost
dead at the desk
of achievement
or murdered
enthusiasm
doesn’t care
any more
to try
I
picked
her up
asked her
what she wanted
she just wanted rest
can you believe that
there was no specific
illness or desire or loss to speak of
well, I could be that wasted too
if I gave in and that’s the
difference between us that’s
why I’ll make it to the
mother fucking top someday just
watch me die up there.
having
I wish I’d never had you
I take it all back I take back that
[ ] I take back
[ ]
[ ]
because now
I’m hourless I’m a belly of water forming into
a drip drip drip I drop onto the hot back of
my dreams in a calamitous panic thinking
that I still have time to get back
but I never do
have enough
of myself
to drink
time or
enough
of time
to drink
myself in
Day 7
You should have seen me I was perfect I saw the sunrise I swam in the lido with a friend as the day turned yellow and I was back just in time for a perfect banana and my morning meeting with the heads. I was reeling from the cold I guess the exhilaration and my ideas were gorgeous ecological even I would say and then I took a spontaneous break just because I could because there was this perfect gap between tasks and I lay on the floor and just happened to develop my ideas perfectly thank god for my spontaneity and my sense of balance and then I got this call from a friend of a friend of an uncle of a banana and they bought my idea for thousands it might even be millions if I go rock climbing in the evening and stop by the quirky bar to drink a half pint with the bartender who (by the way she) has tattoos which categorise suffering into five perfect symbols: a dripping ham, an explosion, a skeletal rabbit, a tiny flower in a glass sphere, and a nasty eye you think you recognise.
Wilful Amnesia Girl: A Study of Her
After Parul Seghal’s ‘Case Against the Trauma Plot’
She’s sitting on the plastic seat
like it’s the edge of a motel bed
and a paper bag with mottled
aubergines in vibrates on the
carriage floor between her feet
old brogues I want to say fallen
over purse– wide eyes–
she gives me all of that
and a small amount more:
how she likes to wash the
corners of the kitchen floor
on her hands and knees
how she lives alone and has
on her mantelpiece a single
flat sand dollar
that she takes and looks at
while she masturbates
how she likes to eat refrigerated
pears for breakfast and
now you’d expect her
to pull back the curtain on
childhood
but she resists
she won’t backflash for you
she finds your therapeutic scripts
wanting undoubtably she is the
“person to whom things happened”
but not a crank for your live stream pain plot
we don’t know she exists because we
see her wounds we know she exists
because of the aubergines, the brogues,
the saucy sand dollar and the refrigerated pears
you may watch what she does next
(takes out her phone to text)
but she won’t let you make her misery
visible freeze force stasis repeat
yes she finds your therapeutic scripts wanting
in fact lets get to it
there’s no bloody chamber
any longer, you already consumed it
there’s just the motel room
to house her backstory and if you flick
on the lights in there all
you’ll find is a young
hungry writer who needs to
monetise some part of her pain &
tidy it up for you
so
she says
eat it
untitled
what do you mean by debris
do you mean carcasses like
rotting red strips of flesh
on bone or do you mean the
split branches that lie in trees
and swaddle trunks until the storm
Eunice blows I just wanted to know
what you mean when you say
wastage to me
Sabbatical: the testimony of an afternoon
Blessings, they are about me now,
flying out their insect lives in quickly spun knots.
Confidences, they are talking to me urgent and
rattling out their breath for as long as it will last
sweet when you expected stale. Elderly, it’s taken me
this long to realise how perfectly/ energetically/ seamlessly/ precisely/ systematically/ wryly/ rampantly thoughts prune themselves, when you’re looking another way.
Thank you for reading & send me return e-letters if you’d like ! I love them like I love summer parties
x
View from my window featuring a spoon made by @studio.tamsk https://www.studiotamsk.com/
