On Residue:
I’ve often felt the character of a house invade my person. The pressure of a room. The presence of a room’s position within a building, of that building’s position in relation to the adjacent buildings, the opposing buildings, the planned buildings. The shared walls, the narrow alleys, the upturned dirt of a newly designated garden that hasn’t yet been patted down. One city-centre flat I lived in had a small rectangular window in the bedroom, in the wall facing the head of the bed. To get the light, to check the day, I only had to raise my body up on my elbows, lift my neck. During the year I lived there, a series of skyscrapers were built on the prime estate to the rear of the complex of small red-brick two-high flats, presumably ex-council properites, mostly lived in by people who had been there forever and who other people were waiting to die. Storey by storey, my sunlight (and the last sunlight of some of those pensioners still hanging on to architecture’s earlier ideals) was knocked out, only to be replaced by the fractured sunlight of the reflective coating they went on to apply to the city’s latest skyhigh. The dwellings of each of these poems are worlds - with myths, with ghosts, with storms and tides and anniversaries and languages and neighbouring planets. They are eulogies to dead yet formative selves, to selves that continue to drive or haunt me. I’ve been a different person in each of these structural way points. I’ve died and lived and tried and failed a hundred thousand times. I move, I wipe the slate. The silt around my toes comes with me, the lice embedded in my hair. I sink into the latest carpet or slide along ungarnished floorboards. I unpack, collect and throw, a baleen filter. I map routes out from the new nucleus. I spread. I open the doors, to the front and the back, eddies of wind make my skin prickle. I’m heavy with children now, there are containers on ships we can pay for transit and there are gentle sentiments to protect and shelter. For the past two years I have lived in a remote castle, mice have got in but little else. My children notice or do not notice the madness of a wife turned monument, of a coin glued to the ground, of an unsoiled seed in an unopened drawer as the dampness that is life absorbs into the surrounding paper. These poems were a way of returning to the drift of all those buildings I knew way back when the world was turning. Of returning to the flow of the people who came and went and came and went again. Without movement, the mind slows to a halt. My body is a slender portal and my breath is that which passes through it.
