The stuff you are. To be as Cioran said a lump inconvenienced by awareness. In the bones we build a house of sentence. A piece of me comes loose and opens the door, images pour through the eye of the what that is left. Hh, breath, train swaying. Stare the fragments back onto the tree. The cloud that you hold as ‘arm, hand’ cannot escape the fleshes at the end of the finger, a whale-fluke from the floorboards. Driving up to see M, there is mist all the way. This white crumbles in a sudden thought, materia prima, and the story I listen to, the other cars, not random, fit together as light lifts between mist and field, the thumb-printed smudges become trees.

/

Giles Goodland‘s books include Of Discourse (Grand Iota 2023). A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001) Capital (Salt, 2006), Dumb Messengers (Salt, 2012) and The Masses (Shearsman, 2018). Civil Twilight was published by Parlor Press in 2022. He has worked as a lexicographer, editor, and bookseller, and teaches evening classes on poetry for Oxford University’s department of continuing education, and lives in West London.