The challenge was to try to write directly from the raw impulse, the point at which the irresistible drive to write begins but has as yet to select and marshal language into form and shape. What I found was that even at that inchoate growth point a monitoring process takes place and a discipline kicks in. At the moment the first word emerges to frame a sense impression, the next word is in the breech.
Sucked pebble:
tongued smooth by black sand.
Starflecks on a sable field,
sour white, bleached as night,
juice dried, a flat splash.
Old coin:
dun metal edged like a
flint shard, spent, effaced,
the ghost profile watching
west, the setting point.
Bleached horns:
hook hanging, depending nothing
but planet-wrack,
clipped strings of light,
the dead hair of comets.
Broken button:
tugged and twined, frayed against
the cape and cowl, shrugged high
and loose in ice-heart
marrowbone dark.
Flat cataract:
milk or smoke or silica,
obscuring the macula, watching
only what she remembers
of red shift, of spectrum drift.
Abalone pearl:
infected by a flushed horizon
thus pink and purple,
elliptical meniscus,
frozen albumen.
Eyes in the night:
tsuki, menes,
chand, spogmay,
he’ni, loar,
namwaikaina.











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