Annotations

(Being Book 4 of Graphology)

Imperfect memory
has chasms deeply yawning
in reception, in Rossby

waves rip up
the Northern light,
authentically driven

like song in Virgil's
ninth eclogue, unable
to prevent the soldiery

claiming territory,
goats steady on the path
as a noonday sun

is guessed overhead,
sky like mirrored sea
somewhere outside

the concept, specified
as nought on a Beaufort scale --
resistance of city

enticing the veritable
with imitations, odes
outflanking balladry



and the strongest
surviving a publicity
of false announcements,

death certificates
reaping an overwhelming
narrative voice,

the gleaning poet
wasting chaff,
winnowing

applications
of folly, of hydraulics
and terraces. Frost

harnesses
mid-winter days
and glass houses

glower, while brooding
off-season a cat's-paw settles
in the sulky waters

of vacations --
kindled like bounties
itemized as recollection



despite weather's
patterned changing,
or the Trotskyite

throwing a spanner in the works,
privileged protest,
viewer-friendly

movement, eco-gendered
and specific,
plausible selves

languishing in a cell
as if caring only
for biography,

tin cans stressing criteria,
spray paint deepening as visibility drops
and Beaufort is a file

held in Bangkok,
an absurdist drama
just outside a realm

of Hansard, hydro-
logical cycle, or circular
of phlegms and humors,



zones where particles
are never smaller than atoms,
and capacity

for consistency
is Aristotelian in its
magnitude

and breadth;
a flurry driving the stuff
of a burst flour bag

over a small town,
its only industry,
Bing Crosby in Dongara

Western Australia,
some time outside his own,
spatially readjusted

in the prospect
of Song's Cycle,
that Menalcas himself

had an indigenous
turn of phrase, cultish
in the master territory,



sending flares up
over pacified waters
and costing millions

in wanton search projects,
fire-stick
burnt as anti-eco

propaganda
by smart asses hungry
in the politburos

of down under,
that we might call this
analogous

and diachronically
Australian: moving in or out
from a centre,

red rock contra-band
in the travellerís tale,
horizontal

conquest, Mont Blanc
of an unsublime nothingness,
the pun they might later



name as Voss: dingo
credited as wolf, incest
passed off as suppression

or continental drift,
precipitating in tongues
voiced like nulla nullas,

and sulphur-coated authors
appropriating steady print,
emphasizing vicarious

sandpaintings
emblematic totalizing missions
of justice,

quivering stretched below
oak primeval in the empireís
hulks and brigs,

leaning to the wind
as seas of wheat ripple
and find calibration,

ideolectically
damning a sunning
lizard, peripheral



and itemized
late in the piece,
stabilizing

yet another chunk
of bourgeois text
liberating constructions

of time tracked
as if technology is prognostic
and curving like swathes

of the monitor's tail
outside the boundaries
of instinct, distinctly

intense on the shores
of an inland sea, lugged vessel
lost to sudden storm,

the faint echo of hubris
barely bothering to lend its name
to such irrelevant

activities, at this point
in time, though inconsistency
lavishes growth and irrigates



doubt self-reflexively,
in under and over tone
per source of vibration

per pure tone
and vibrancy
thresh-holding the peripheral crops

primed with super phosphate
draining through sand plain
and percolating. Ground

water devaluing
the filling magnet,
sundial pulling

the sphere concurrently,
gliding vowels
as exclamation

rests above
and the sun lies
weather shift in skies

plural and elided,
condensed as script
as high density


fields compressed
behaviourist drilling
tines occluding

nudged furrows
in observed vents
goldenly cleaving

against silo walls,
idiomatic anti-contrast
formalising plough discs

and intensifying,
when with hanging
fog smoke rises

vertically,
rain following
Inwards' lore

as a warble lodges
in the syrinx
and a gift of pipes

is accepted
in another tongue,
sung hand-in-hand



down to the scrawl,
the Miltonic hand
inscribing molecular bonds:

Poggioli's homo artifex
restless in the crowd,
chaining itself to trees

destined for the saw,
pristine interiors
voiced velar plosive

qua prescriptive pulp
and digestion, fallen
forms reduce the growing,

passé simple, solid
contracts in groves
of influence,

a boustrophedonic
atlas inscribed
in an insular hand,

withholding field bins
against moisture,
abundant risk



of docking
at the sample hut,
the asshole's chirography

both fancy and quick,
flattened on a threshing floor
of weights and quality

and madrigals of cogs and fencing
wire entangling hungry sheep
introduced and straining

despite the constant
slaughter, gallows
frantic beneath an amber

metonymy.
Iron age forts --
flat and hollow

as rings of hills
are not -- solid
to a granite core,

solid accents embedded
and sexualising
the strongest warheads


remaining after
disarmament: in Darwin
yellow cake hovers

and Wharfies
equivocate,
white singlets glowing

lawn mowers coughing
coagulated oil
over Southern pastures

and board rooms
of generalization,
the stereotypical industry

chiding hurt given
by a slight to a stalwart
acceptably different

and sticking his or her neck out
for a brother or a sister,
for smooth verse and an unlettered

muse, but not a brandname.
Unlettered nature pshaws
the High Table suit



as the gong is rung
and a vegan is catered for
without obvious fuss:

unlettered nature pshaws
annotation as decoration
on cake compares

with ploughing out fields,
desert closing in and in and in,
roused strictly against

a bordering comedy,
distinctly white torrents
of herbicidal foam

within the parallel framework,
circuits of nostalgia replete
in dawning, light enhancing

the manager's boyish eyes
as hunters claim to have preserved
that species from extinction.

A Gotham City decay
pneumatic on a platform
of seedling trays



donated by the ministry
hawking tickets in sound
gardens, sunning

ethnic allocation
as intimate with profit
and profligacy

joined in holy manifestoes
in new countries,
overlaying,

palimpsesting
and re-creating
myths of origin

to account
for missing books
and dampen the sound

of oratory; art deco
like stations of a neglected
cross that could

name names if subpoenaed,
restless with a city's litigation,
closing optimism



by the agency
and counterbalancing
rival claims as they work

to diminish sovereignty
or rearrange Niagara falls
as units of drainage

or philanthropy,
artificial lakes bobbing up
like satellites

in contradictory orbits,
tossed corpses risen
on gas beds,

defrosting apathy
and the town electing
a new mayor.

Collective action
threatens to save
a wild life sanctuary

and foxes are busy
gnawing away at the wildlife,
as if they had some other



place to go
and are being down right malicious,
as in, you know, they rip

the heads of chickens
just for the hell of it,
observing codes of unknowing

like repetition --
you can bet your bottom
dollar on it

in any currency
or jargon of insecurity --
no Trojan horse threatening

to undermine evaluation
as action in-itself,
this cult of courtesy.

Distrust profoundly this I
the autograph hunter employs
as sample or prompt,

as worth n/a's its awe,
as lock stock and barrel
and ankh and crucifix


are honestly exploited
as fictions and I allows
the God in self

free expression,
questioning hybridity
on the fringes of modernity,

like white-walled wheels
leaving burn-out marks
on the road stretching

all the way
to liberation theology,
overcast and dry

as lightning strokes
a distant coast
and I sweats

under boughs
of corrugated iron
mimicking flight delays

in spaces growing less stable
with each diminishing front,
the tiny compass in the sole



of your shoe leading
it astray. Machine op-
erators cling like

testosterone
whirled out of
the dynamo

where horizon
is a manipulation
of shadow and electricity

and the elegy
is the profoundest ex-
pression of love,

an exceptional network
of otherness
and referentiality:

the facts
dragging snow
off the lake

as more than method
effects gaps in whiteness,
a production-line mausoleum


regionally enacting
where I becomes they and we
and rolls off;

as labour divides
componentry
in a discourse

of exclusion
fringe
communicates

with fringe,
let us know
about it.

Because the you has moved
calque undulates about a scene
reminiscent

of a home run
hit in a big game
by a team whose town

is on the brink
of bankruptcy.
And tourists



won't care and don't
and won't go where
a trophy dislodges poverty

in a grand room
that is treeless and without
tracts of water,

bitter birds
kerning tunes
on fence posts,

generic fumblings
itemizing
change rooms.

The power-lifted soil
supports bloated granules
of succession,

each weed uttering
monopolies of stanzas,
hedgerows cut back

as copse planters
head out against a sharp cold,
deflecting rotation



and insisting,
radarscopic blanking
enforcing fallowness,

direction
as progressive
as depth

in the play of light,
a surface current
playing up like popularity

ridging-in over
high art, a Theocritan
portraiture

indicating position
with precision, the tractor
clumping lugs of clay

in rotations
sublimating
the craved for object,

atmospheric
machine propagating
subaltern speech



(Homi Bhabha c/- Gareth Griffiths)
maintaining the for
in it's in-between

an edictness of English,
a first crop's struggle
expectedly on Walden Pond

uncertain, assaulting
darkly the rudest places,
those dark unruly spaces

surfacing the carapace
of earth, busy
in strengthening

strain
and the comfort
of parchment.

Facts indulge such
as Yakabindie Bob
paying almost nothing

for the labourings
of indigenes,
tribal women



currency
against the binaries
of wool and starvation,

the prevalence of
of and the
in the pastoral quiddity:

a hard time of it was had
beneath the oral tree,
as story ran into story

under the clauses
of speech event,
the curing ritual.

A storm rolls in
tithing angular blooms
out of dirt,

red dust runs as wine
over the front pages
of a local rag,

and celebration
is named as corroboration
or uprising.