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Abbey
Asceticism
Atop
Attic
Bark
Beam
Beardtongue
Best
Between
Bibles
Black
Blanket
Blooming
Body
Bogs
Bones
Bordered
Burial
By
Catch-cold
Cells

***

Some routine Sunday morning — oily breakfast in my belly — fried eggs and potatoes with a mix of drying beans tossed in tomato slices, green onions and herbs

A kitchen garden meal to bolster against my still cold attic chamber

The roof awash in rain sounds held back by wooden beams and tiles

Enveloped in fuzzy white noise — me and Rebecka at a 2017 Slowdive gig in an intimate venue with church acoustics — my typewriter rhythm section backing a chorus of reverb trails with loooooong decay

I run my hand over a knot on my scrap wood desk, an unsanded patch, a splinter in my pointer finger — a small intrusion jammed inside for the rest of the week

***

Channeling a state of apophatic wuness the Benedictine monk Dom Sylvester Houédard, wearing dark glasses and habit, hunches over his Olivetti Lettera 22, his quarters loud with the clack clack clack slide clack clack clack slide of a craftsman's keys

Constructing a radical architecture of shimmering letterforms

His great work performed at a simple desk with a simple chair, his room furnished with a simple bed befitting the austerity of his monastic order

Around him the stone walls of Prinkash Abbey erected in 1520, supporting a brace of shelves that bough under a collection of theological, philisophical and modernist importance

***

Chair
Chamber
Coffee
Collects
Conjuration
Downstairs
Dozen
Earthy
Eaves
Endure
English
Enough
Especially
Exposed
Farmland
Fermenting
Floriferous
Forest
Foul
Foundation
Fungi

***

An unexpected spell of warm November weather

Me and Rebecka throw off jumpers, hats and gloves, take our daily walk along the old road lined with leafless birch

We check the time before we dart across the tracks, clambering up a verge of gold and copper seed-heads — Deschampsia flexuosa, Hypericum pseudomaculatum, Trifolium arvense

At the top we side-step a stone wall tumbled where the railway line bisects, a hollow cut across farmlands and pastures long since converted to spruce plantation

***

By no means a hermit dsh arrived on the scene like “a beatnik from the Middle Ages time-transported to the delirium of London's avant-garde”, “full of the language of beat poetry until, in 1962, concrete poetry emerged and under his hand became a symbol for demolished boundaries” †

In the two weeks it takes me to shit out this piece I read essays by dsh on the intersection of poetry with

Art with

Meditatory approaches to writing

“GIVING UP ANY POEM-PRACTICE DEPENDING ON LIVING INSIDE THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE – ON WORDS AS THE MEDIUM OF CONSCIOUS BEING” †

I am surely producing my own words all the while but where they go in the days afterwards is a mystery

My attic study converted to a fattening silo for false starts — I write on a post-it note that, “This Machine Kills”

Stick the post-it to the detached travel lid of my typewriter

“nothing is getting written, but I think that what I do is write. I think this because I have fragments all around, and I am sure that I have not written them, yet they keep showing up, and I keep meaning to but never do turn them into something.” ‡

***

Garden
Gathering
Ghost
Glows
Gone
Grey
Gutters
Haunting
Heaven
Hellebore
Hermitage
Historical
Horrors
Host
Hyacinth
Igniting
Immense
Incantation
Kindling
Land
Language

***

I try to drink less coffee

Try to fold myself into the materiality of the house, the way that poets try to fold themselves into landscape in pursuit of the sublime

Starting at the attic window at an angle framing only treetops and

Working my way down

A crooked doorway, a sunken threshold, a misaligned frame measured in famnar and tum by rough farmer's hands

“how can words keep anymore their mindstab meaning outside our dissolving thought-outlines & loss of contact with long ago million years & more extinct 20th century as proved by potassium argon analysis of recent dugup bits of poets?” †

***

Half-way down the road, mud-suck splattering my battered assault boots, we stop outside the increasingly derelict cottage — the fourth of four houses on Sofie's Mountain — two of the four abandoned to time

Uncommon white facade decorated with colourful mosaics depicting native tit species — the garden a collection of marshy ponds, self-seeding Cox Pomona apple trees, escapee Spiraea salicifolia

We look for the telltale signs of roof collapse, the slough of tiles, the sag and sink of wood rot

Over condensing breath Rebecka asks,

“How many Winters do you think it has left?”

---

References.

† Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter, The Life and Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard. Ed. Nicola Simpson (Occasional Papers, 2012).

‡ Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life. Jenny Boully (Coffee House Press, 2018).

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