BY ERIN ROBINSONG
LANGUAGE OF THE BIRDS
“I was unspeakable so I ran into the language of others.”
– Kathy Acker
Bright sentience of morning comes
Out of a concussed cloud –
Hypnotising on its radiant surface
The mind is a complex formal solitude
For a week in flames
And the panic of being trapped
Inside a skull. A presence that moves through
Distortion, through bodies and through
Big bright mind today, white-throated
Sparrow on chains of utterance rides
Right into the window and dies instantly.
If song is invisible is it perceivable
To those who have dissolved
Into air? Every organism
Produces some kind of signalº
To move among and according
To voices the living make in bodies
In the intermediate state
Of having bodies – a mouth
Or thighs for rubbing song
Shapes the waves we’re in –
Releasement through the ears into glistening
*
I’m inside your language
Cut with its rhythms, half
Awake, spreading into the alley
Into the air where the mind is spatial
Muteness is a matter of curiosity that first
Returns things, the dawn correspondence
Spatialised arousal, have you seen mine
Thought is a circulatory system
Of which my mind is a node
That speaks the muscularity
Of this, and the colour
Needed a throat to sing
And a throat needed someone &
For some reason it needed me who
Could not really sing, for the air to move
Through is what I mean by song
Then I awoke in my differentiated body
And I had work to resist. I love work
And if sex is as hilarious as you make
It sound I will go looking for it
In the trees, looking in the air of fucking’s
Joke around which swims all other things
*
I came with my vocal sadness
To the bend in the alley
In the raging dawn to dissolve
In the fabric of utterance
Rhythmically looping sound
Through bodily circuitry
To study resonance’s helix
Insane with ergonomics I leak into air
To ask you to dissolve something
I may never be able to explain
In these elongations of mind
Into audible time
So I came with my problem to
The dawn, it seemed like the place
*
Tuesday, presence fields overlap
In waves
Travelling through waves. Sound
Is an apparition I rely on –
Elaborate vocal rolls roll through me
Extend you small bird through
Space. Concentric enunciation
Your soundbody enfolds me –
So are you small or are you all of space?
Intermediary airy flesh I slip into
Your vocal folds, soak my I in plenitude
And when I couldn’t speak
You spoke steadily, electric blue, my brain enflamed
Words
Meant very little, foreign, sharp. Speech seeks a border
To eradicate
*
A sparrow in my throat-
Damped song or regular
Unmarked proclivity for verbal
Pleasure, a rosiness
In your chest enfolds me, the dawn
Vomiting song in rivulets of mouthy
Warpings, genuflections
Rhythmic head
Bird language seams between
Utterance and architecture
In verbal pulses, concentric
Presence. A crease increasing
Older folds is the day appearing
Into the day, is another
In your songbody enfolded
In the day’s prism for brains
Speaking is a ray – say it, say
Body’s no discrete killable finitude
Where speech goes there you go
On the long tongue of mind
Music extrudes you. Speech-soaked, mutely
Concentric head
*
Muteness is about grief it seems to me now
A phase of it
That’s incoherent, there’s another phase where
The clarity
Just cuts. I’m listening to you because you bring
These phases together, or because
You sing through walls you sing on my head
You personage of space, shimmering there
Who I did not not see. Bewildered I wade into
Your utterance erupting, related by air
And time, related by a song, wading through throats
Related
By wind and time (the same wind
Rode)
I’ve been watching a vine form elaborate decisions
All along
The balcony. Every vibrant need exerts
A force
Its body are decisions. Its body are transportation
I stupidly wept
Writing an email to my dad. I stupidly
Wept
During a Zoom reading, too close and too far
Everyone
From my enormous buckling
Face
*
I is a node in a flickering fabric
Language, long songs, leisure
Move through walls, states
Vestibules, spiked ledges
Trees that elaborate around the
Life so life can go on thinking and
Have a place to hide. The soft vibrations
Of the female zhouu zhouu zhouu
While the male has no subtlety
Schweeep schweeep. They like it.
The cats in their predatory
Morning slinking get no relief
I’ve seen. I worry I’m reinjuring
My brain with this relentlessness
Needing to stop when I can’t stop.
But I just think that’s true, which is
Part of the injury unrelated to the
Impact. Attempting to ‘take a break’
And read something unrelated I try
The Tibetan Book of the Dead which
In the original Tibetan is called The
Great Liberation by Hearing in the
Intermediate States. The intermediate
States being: waking, dreaming
Meditation, the time of death
And the two successive phases of the
After-death. A concussion is somewhere
Between all of these
A word is a wave, and a song
is the weave
The weave is long. A song a long way
A word song way
*
I remember parties that cured me
A spontaneous wealth
Arising amidst bodies
In regular rooms accelerating
Polyvocal, kinked
A true party was not often
Found in peopled rooms
Those mysticisms of conditions
Marriage of true minds
Sluicing around before
The dawn’s language
Of birds enters
Thought thresholds
Seeking audience with the dawn
And the first thing I noticed
Was each morning
Raged so differently
On Friday you bleat
Experimental jokes
This party moves in waves
Of chat through evergreen
An ash that was
Sunday is muted, violet, flowing
Tree to tree, delicate bird work
On sung fabric of space of
Day’s opening keeps us
Here querying the air in sapphic
Vocables, so the sun rises
Your speech manifests as Monday
On chains of utterance from a cedar
A neighbour sneezes and vanishes
To the shifting light, parallaxing
The opposite of rock or song
Is liquid rock is goo
Becoming early
In a home distributed
From Guyana to Alaska, all this way just
To shag on the power lines, last year’s
Grapevine, the tattered cedar
You really love. Visibility is
The smallest part about you
An envelope for organs
To carry through the air
Speech is the process in which you live
Through walls, through anything solid
To trouble, any border to debunk
*
Hearing is nearness is open
Feeling
Vesicle of the possible thought
Rearing
Sameness and solitude organise
Revealing
Architectures stolen in maximum
Daylight
Reason resists almost everything
Noteworthy
*
The mind is drugs
That’s the premise of this study
That’s the thing, that’s the lack
That isn’t here, in the air – help
I could ask the birds for
The mind is a sparrow in the grapevine
Carrying a length of plastic sheeting in his beak
A bird, a never-ending nerve
Elongating thought across the sky
Through verbiage into vocal foliage
The mind is a minor power of the
Sun tending an amnesia
As I step into the weather of your
Speaking
Birds are people who travel
The wave inside brain sun –
Shines the meeting is time
Spun from sun –
All of this saying
Is about saying
And if I could
And how I would
And when I did what I
Said was speak to me
LANGUAGE OF THE BIRDS
“I was unspeakable so I ran into the language of others.”
– Kathy Acker
Bright sentience of morning comes
Out of a concussed cloud –
Hypnotising on its radiant surface
The mind is a complex formal solitude
For a week in flames
And the panic of being trapped
Inside a skull. A presence that moves through
Distortion, through bodies and through
Big bright mind today, white-throated
Sparrow on chains of utterance rides
Right into the window and dies instantly.
If song is invisible is it perceivable
To those who have dissolved
Into air? Every organism
Produces some kind of signalº
To move among and according
To voices the living make in bodies
In the intermediate state
Of having bodies – a mouth
Or thighs for rubbing song
Shapes the waves we’re in –
Releasement through the ears into glistening
*
I’m inside your language
Cut with its rhythms, half
Awake, spreading into the alley
Into the air where the mind is spatial
Muteness is a matter of curiosity that first
Returns things, the dawn correspondence
Spatialised arousal, have you seen mine
Thought is a circulatory system
Of which my mind is a node
That speaks the muscularity
Of this, and the colour
Needed a throat to sing
And a throat needed someone &
For some reason it needed me who
Could not really sing, for the air to move
Through is what I mean by song
Then I awoke in my differentiated body
And I had work to resist. I love work
And if sex is as hilarious as you make
It sound I will go looking for it
In the trees, looking in the air of fucking’s
Joke around which swims all other things
*
I came with my vocal sadness
To the bend in the alley
In the raging dawn to dissolve
In the fabric of utterance
Rhythmically looping sound
Through bodily circuitry
To study resonance’s helix
Insane with ergonomics I leak into air
To ask you to dissolve something
I may never be able to explain
In these elongations of mind
Into audible time
So I came with my problem to
The dawn, it seemed like the place
*
Tuesday, presence fields overlap
In waves
Travelling through waves. Sound
Is an apparition I rely on –
Elaborate vocal rolls roll through me
Extend you small bird through
Space. Concentric enunciation
Your soundbody enfolds me –
So are you small or are you all of space?
Intermediary airy flesh I slip into
Your vocal folds, soak my I in plenitude
And when I couldn’t speak
You spoke steadily, electric blue, my brain enflamed
Words
Meant very little, foreign, sharp. Speech seeks a border
To eradicate
*
A sparrow in my throat-
Damped song or regular
Unmarked proclivity for verbal
Pleasure, a rosiness
In your chest enfolds me, the dawn
Vomiting song in rivulets of mouthy
Warpings, genuflections
Rhythmic head
Bird language seams between
Utterance and architecture
In verbal pulses, concentric
Presence. A crease increasing
Older folds is the day appearing
Into the day, is another
In your songbody enfolded
In the day’s prism for brains
Speaking is a ray – say it, say
Body’s no discrete killable finitude
Where speech goes there you go
On the long tongue of mind
Music extrudes you. Speech-soaked, mutely
Concentric head
*
Muteness is about grief it seems to me now
A phase of it
That’s incoherent, there’s another phase where
The clarity
Just cuts. I’m listening to you because you bring
These phases together, or because
You sing through walls you sing on my head
You personage of space, shimmering there
Who I did not not see. Bewildered I wade into
Your utterance erupting, related by air
And time, related by a song, wading through throats
Related
By wind and time (the same wind
Rode)
I’ve been watching a vine form elaborate decisions
All along
The balcony. Every vibrant need exerts
A force
Its body are decisions. Its body are transportation
I stupidly wept
Writing an email to my dad. I stupidly
Wept
During a Zoom reading, too close and too far
Everyone
From my enormous buckling
Face
*
I is a node in a flickering fabric
Language, long songs, leisure
Move through walls, states
Vestibules, spiked ledges
Trees that elaborate around the
Life so life can go on thinking and
Have a place to hide. The soft vibrations
Of the female zhouu zhouu zhouu
While the male has no subtlety
Schweeep schweeep. They like it.
The cats in their predatory
Morning slinking get no relief
I’ve seen. I worry I’m reinjuring
My brain with this relentlessness
Needing to stop when I can’t stop.
But I just think that’s true, which is
Part of the injury unrelated to the
Impact. Attempting to ‘take a break’
And read something unrelated I try
The Tibetan Book of the Dead which
In the original Tibetan is called The
Great Liberation by Hearing in the
Intermediate States. The intermediate
States being: waking, dreaming
Meditation, the time of death
And the two successive phases of the
After-death. A concussion is somewhere
Between all of these
A word is a wave, and a song
is the weave
The weave is long. A song a long way
A word song way
*
I remember parties that cured me
A spontaneous wealth
Arising amidst bodies
In regular rooms accelerating
Polyvocal, kinked
A true party was not often
Found in peopled rooms
Those mysticisms of conditions
Marriage of true minds
Sluicing around before
The dawn’s language
Of birds enters
Thought thresholds
Seeking audience with the dawn
And the first thing I noticed
Was each morning
Raged so differently
On Friday you bleat
Experimental jokes
This party moves in waves
Of chat through evergreen
An ash that was
Sunday is muted, violet, flowing
Tree to tree, delicate bird work
On sung fabric of space of
Day’s opening keeps us
Here querying the air in sapphic
Vocables, so the sun rises
Your speech manifests as Monday
On chains of utterance from a cedar
A neighbour sneezes and vanishes
To the shifting light, parallaxing
The opposite of rock or song
Is liquid rock is goo
Becoming early
In a home distributed
From Guyana to Alaska, all this way just
To shag on the power lines, last year’s
Grapevine, the tattered cedar
You really love. Visibility is
The smallest part about you
An envelope for organs
To carry through the air
Speech is the process in which you live
Through walls, through anything solid
To trouble, any border to debunk
*
Hearing is nearness is open
Feeling
Vesicle of the possible thought
Rearing
Sameness and solitude organise
Revealing
Architectures stolen in maximum
Daylight
Reason resists almost everything
Noteworthy
*
The mind is drugs
That’s the premise of this study
That’s the thing, that’s the lack
That isn’t here, in the air – help
I could ask the birds for
The mind is a sparrow in the grapevine
Carrying a length of plastic sheeting in his beak
A bird, a never-ending nerve
Elongating thought across the sky
Through verbiage into vocal foliage
The mind is a minor power of the
Sun tending an amnesia
As I step into the weather of your
Speaking
Birds are people who travel
The wave inside brain sun –
Shines the meeting is time
Spun from sun –
All of this saying
Is about saying
And if I could
And how I would
And when I did what I
Said was speak to me
Erin Robinsong is a poet and interdisciplinary artist working with ecological imagination. She is the author of Rag Cosmology (Book*hug, 2017) and Wet Dream (Brick Books, 2022), both winners of the AM Klein Prize for Poetry. Her readings and performances have been presented by the More Than Human Life (MOTH) Festival, The Architectural Association School of Architecture, Toronto International Festival of Authors, OFFTA Live Art Festival, Fierce Festival, Blackwood Gallery, and more. Collaborative dance works with Andréa de Keijzer and Hanna Sybille Müller include This ritual is not an accident; Facing away from that which is coming; and Polymorphic Microbe Bodies. A PhD candidate at Concordia University (Montreal), Erin’s research-creation work focuses on regenerative, relational and embodied poetics.
BY ERIN ROBINSONG
LANGUAGE OF THE BIRDS
“I was unspeakable so I ran into the language of others.”
– Kathy Acker
Bright sentience of morning comes
Out of a concussed cloud –
Hypnotising on its radiant surface
The mind is a complex formal solitude
For a week in flames
And the panic of being trapped
Inside a skull. A presence that moves through
Distortion, through bodies and through
Big bright mind today, white-throated
Sparrow on chains of utterance rides
Right into the window and dies instantly.
If song is invisible is it perceivable
To those who have dissolved
Into air? Every organism
Produces some kind of signalº
To move among and according
To voices the living make in bodies
In the intermediate state
Of having bodies – a mouth
Or thighs for rubbing song
Shapes the waves we’re in –
Releasement through the ears into glistening
*
I’m inside your language
Cut with its rhythms, half
Awake, spreading into the alley
Into the air where the mind is spatial
Muteness is a matter of curiosity that first
Returns things, the dawn correspondence
Spatialised arousal, have you seen mine
Thought is a circulatory system
Of which my mind is a node
That speaks the muscularity
Of this, and the colour
Needed a throat to sing
And a throat needed someone &
For some reason it needed me who
Could not really sing, for the air to move
Through is what I mean by song
Then I awoke in my differentiated body
And I had work to resist. I love work
And if sex is as hilarious as you make
It sound I will go looking for it
In the trees, looking in the air of fucking’s
Joke around which swims all other things
*
I came with my vocal sadness
To the bend in the alley
In the raging dawn to dissolve
In the fabric of utterance
Rhythmically looping sound
Through bodily circuitry
To study resonance’s helix
Insane with ergonomics I leak into air
To ask you to dissolve something
I may never be able to explain
In these elongations of mind
Into audible time
So I came with my problem to
The dawn, it seemed like the place
*
Tuesday, presence fields overlap
In waves
Travelling through waves. Sound
Is an apparition I rely on –
Elaborate vocal rolls roll through me
Extend you small bird through
Space. Concentric enunciation
Your soundbody enfolds me –
So are you small or are you all of space?
Intermediary airy flesh I slip into
Your vocal folds, soak my I in plenitude
And when I couldn’t speak
You spoke steadily, electric blue, my brain enflamed
Words
Meant very little, foreign, sharp. Speech seeks a border
To eradicate
*
A sparrow in my throat-
Damped song or regular
Unmarked proclivity for verbal
Pleasure, a rosiness
In your chest enfolds me, the dawn
Vomiting song in rivulets of mouthy
Warpings, genuflections
Rhythmic head
Bird language seams between
Utterance and architecture
In verbal pulses, concentric
Presence. A crease increasing
Older folds is the day appearing
Into the day, is another
In your songbody enfolded
In the day’s prism for brains
Speaking is a ray – say it, say
Body’s no discrete killable finitude
Where speech goes there you go
On the long tongue of mind
Music extrudes you. Speech-soaked, mutely
Concentric head
*
Muteness is about grief it seems to me now
A phase of it
That’s incoherent, there’s another phase where
The clarity
Just cuts. I’m listening to you because you bring
These phases together, or because
You sing through walls you sing on my head
You personage of space, shimmering there
Who I did not not see. Bewildered I wade into
Your utterance erupting, related by air
And time, related by a song, wading through throats
Related
By wind and time (the same wind
Rode)
I’ve been watching a vine form elaborate decisions
All along
The balcony. Every vibrant need exerts
A force
Its body are decisions. Its body are transportation
I stupidly wept
Writing an email to my dad. I stupidly
Wept
During a Zoom reading, too close and too far
Everyone
From my enormous buckling
Face
*
I is a node in a flickering fabric
Language, long songs, leisure
Move through walls, states
Vestibules, spiked ledges
Trees that elaborate around the
Life so life can go on thinking and
Have a place to hide. The soft vibrations
Of the female zhouu zhouu zhouu
While the male has no subtlety
Schweeep schweeep. They like it.
The cats in their predatory
Morning slinking get no relief
I’ve seen. I worry I’m reinjuring
My brain with this relentlessness
Needing to stop when I can’t stop.
But I just think that’s true, which is
Part of the injury unrelated to the
Impact. Attempting to ‘take a break’
And read something unrelated I try
The Tibetan Book of the Dead which
In the original Tibetan is called The
Great Liberation by Hearing in the
Intermediate States. The intermediate
States being: waking, dreaming
Meditation, the time of death
And the two successive phases of the
After-death. A concussion is somewhere
Between all of these
A word is a wave, and a song
is the weave
The weave is long. A song a long way
A word song way
*
I remember parties that cured me
A spontaneous wealth
Arising amidst bodies
In regular rooms accelerating
Polyvocal, kinked
A true party was not often
Found in peopled rooms
Those mysticisms of conditions
Marriage of true minds
Sluicing around before
The dawn’s language
Of birds enters
Thought thresholds
Seeking audience with the dawn
And the first thing I noticed
Was each morning
Raged so differently
On Friday you bleat
Experimental jokes
This party moves in waves
Of chat through evergreen
An ash that was
Sunday is muted, violet, flowing
Tree to tree, delicate bird work
On sung fabric of space of
Day’s opening keeps us
Here querying the air in sapphic
Vocables, so the sun rises
Your speech manifests as Monday
On chains of utterance from a cedar
A neighbour sneezes and vanishes
To the shifting light, parallaxing
The opposite of rock or song
Is liquid rock is goo
Becoming early
In a home distributed
From Guyana to Alaska, all this way just
To shag on the power lines, last year’s
Grapevine, the tattered cedar
You really love. Visibility is
The smallest part about you
An envelope for organs
To carry through the air
Speech is the process in which you live
Through walls, through anything solid
To trouble, any border to debunk
*
Hearing is nearness is open
Feeling
Vesicle of the possible thought
Rearing
Sameness and solitude organise
Revealing
Architectures stolen in maximum
Daylight
Reason resists almost everything
Noteworthy
*
The mind is drugs
That’s the premise of this study
That’s the thing, that’s the lack
That isn’t here, in the air – help
I could ask the birds for
The mind is a sparrow in the grapevine
Carrying a length of plastic sheeting in his beak
A bird, a never-ending nerve
Elongating thought across the sky
Through verbiage into vocal foliage
The mind is a minor power of the
Sun tending an amnesia
As I step into the weather of your
Speaking
Birds are people who travel
The wave inside brain sun –
Shines the meeting is time
Spun from sun –
All of this saying
Is about saying
And if I could
And how I would
And when I did what I
Said was speak to me
LANGUAGE OF THE BIRDS
“I was unspeakable so I ran into the language of others.”
– Kathy Acker
Bright sentience of morning comes
Out of a concussed cloud –
Hypnotising on its radiant surface
The mind is a complex formal solitude
For a week in flames
And the panic of being trapped
Inside a skull. A presence that moves through
Distortion, through bodies and through
Big bright mind today, white-throated
Sparrow on chains of utterance rides
Right into the window and dies instantly.
If song is invisible is it perceivable
To those who have dissolved
Into air? Every organism
Produces some kind of signalº
To move among and according
To voices the living make in bodies
In the intermediate state
Of having bodies – a mouth
Or thighs for rubbing song
Shapes the waves we’re in –
Releasement through the ears into glistening
*
I’m inside your language
Cut with its rhythms, half
Awake, spreading into the alley
Into the air where the mind is spatial
Muteness is a matter of curiosity that first
Returns things, the dawn correspondence
Spatialised arousal, have you seen mine
Thought is a circulatory system
Of which my mind is a node
That speaks the muscularity
Of this, and the colour
Needed a throat to sing
And a throat needed someone &
For some reason it needed me who
Could not really sing, for the air to move
Through is what I mean by song
Then I awoke in my differentiated body
And I had work to resist. I love work
And if sex is as hilarious as you make
It sound I will go looking for it
In the trees, looking in the air of fucking’s
Joke around which swims all other things
*
I came with my vocal sadness
To the bend in the alley
In the raging dawn to dissolve
In the fabric of utterance
Rhythmically looping sound
Through bodily circuitry
To study resonance’s helix
Insane with ergonomics I leak into air
To ask you to dissolve something
I may never be able to explain
In these elongations of mind
Into audible time
So I came with my problem to
The dawn, it seemed like the place
*
Tuesday, presence fields overlap
In waves
Travelling through waves. Sound
Is an apparition I rely on –
Elaborate vocal rolls roll through me
Extend you small bird through
Space. Concentric enunciation
Your soundbody enfolds me –
So are you small or are you all of space?
Intermediary airy flesh I slip into
Your vocal folds, soak my I in plenitude
And when I couldn’t speak
You spoke steadily, electric blue, my brain enflamed
Words
Meant very little, foreign, sharp. Speech seeks a border
To eradicate
*
A sparrow in my throat-
Damped song or regular
Unmarked proclivity for verbal
Pleasure, a rosiness
In your chest enfolds me, the dawn
Vomiting song in rivulets of mouthy
Warpings, genuflections
Rhythmic head
Bird language seams between
Utterance and architecture
In verbal pulses, concentric
Presence. A crease increasing
Older folds is the day appearing
Into the day, is another
In your songbody enfolded
In the day’s prism for brains
Speaking is a ray – say it, say
Body’s no discrete killable finitude
Where speech goes there you go
On the long tongue of mind
Music extrudes you. Speech-soaked, mutely
Concentric head
*
Muteness is about grief it seems to me now
A phase of it
That’s incoherent, there’s another phase where
The clarity
Just cuts. I’m listening to you because you bring
These phases together, or because
You sing through walls you sing on my head
You personage of space, shimmering there
Who I did not not see. Bewildered I wade into
Your utterance erupting, related by air
And time, related by a song, wading through throats
Related
By wind and time (the same wind
Rode)
I’ve been watching a vine form elaborate decisions
All along
The balcony. Every vibrant need exerts
A force
Its body are decisions. Its body are transportation
I stupidly wept
Writing an email to my dad. I stupidly
Wept
During a Zoom reading, too close and too far
Everyone
From my enormous buckling
Face
*
I is a node in a flickering fabric
Language, long songs, leisure
Move through walls, states
Vestibules, spiked ledges
Trees that elaborate around the
Life so life can go on thinking and
Have a place to hide. The soft vibrations
Of the female zhouu zhouu zhouu
While the male has no subtlety
Schweeep schweeep. They like it.
The cats in their predatory
Morning slinking get no relief
I’ve seen. I worry I’m reinjuring
My brain with this relentlessness
Needing to stop when I can’t stop.
But I just think that’s true, which is
Part of the injury unrelated to the
Impact. Attempting to ‘take a break’
And read something unrelated I try
The Tibetan Book of the Dead which
In the original Tibetan is called The
Great Liberation by Hearing in the
Intermediate States. The intermediate
States being: waking, dreaming
Meditation, the time of death
And the two successive phases of the
After-death. A concussion is somewhere
Between all of these
A word is a wave, and a song
is the weave
The weave is long. A song a long way
A word song way
*
I remember parties that cured me
A spontaneous wealth
Arising amidst bodies
In regular rooms accelerating
Polyvocal, kinked
A true party was not often
Found in peopled rooms
Those mysticisms of conditions
Marriage of true minds
Sluicing around before
The dawn’s language
Of birds enters
Thought thresholds
Seeking audience with the dawn
And the first thing I noticed
Was each morning
Raged so differently
On Friday you bleat
Experimental jokes
This party moves in waves
Of chat through evergreen
An ash that was
Sunday is muted, violet, flowing
Tree to tree, delicate bird work
On sung fabric of space of
Day’s opening keeps us
Here querying the air in sapphic
Vocables, so the sun rises
Your speech manifests as Monday
On chains of utterance from a cedar
A neighbour sneezes and vanishes
To the shifting light, parallaxing
The opposite of rock or song
Is liquid rock is goo
Becoming early
In a home distributed
From Guyana to Alaska, all this way just
To shag on the power lines, last year’s
Grapevine, the tattered cedar
You really love. Visibility is
The smallest part about you
An envelope for organs
To carry through the air
Speech is the process in which you live
Through walls, through anything solid
To trouble, any border to debunk
*
Hearing is nearness is open
Feeling
Vesicle of the possible thought
Rearing
Sameness and solitude organise
Revealing
Architectures stolen in maximum
Daylight
Reason resists almost everything
Noteworthy
*
The mind is drugs
That’s the premise of this study
That’s the thing, that’s the lack
That isn’t here, in the air – help
I could ask the birds for
The mind is a sparrow in the grapevine
Carrying a length of plastic sheeting in his beak
A bird, a never-ending nerve
Elongating thought across the sky
Through verbiage into vocal foliage
The mind is a minor power of the
Sun tending an amnesia
As I step into the weather of your
Speaking
Birds are people who travel
The wave inside brain sun –
Shines the meeting is time
Spun from sun –
All of this saying
Is about saying
And if I could
And how I would
And when I did what I
Said was speak to me
Erin Robinsong is a poet and interdisciplinary artist working with ecological imagination. She is the author of Rag Cosmology (Book*hug, 2017) and Wet Dream (Brick Books, 2022), both winners of the AM Klein Prize for Poetry. Her readings and performances have been presented by the More Than Human Life (MOTH) Festival, The Architectural Association School of Architecture, Toronto International Festival of Authors, OFFTA Live Art Festival, Fierce Festival, Blackwood Gallery, and more. Collaborative dance works with Andréa de Keijzer and Hanna Sybille Müller include This ritual is not an accident; Facing away from that which is coming; and Polymorphic Microbe Bodies. A PhD candidate at Concordia University (Montreal), Erin’s research-creation work focuses on regenerative, relational and embodied poetics.
BY ERIN ROBINSONG
LANGUAGE OF THE BIRDS
“I was unspeakable so I ran into the language of others.”
– Kathy Acker
Bright sentience of morning comes
Out of a concussed cloud –
Hypnotising on its radiant surface
The mind is a complex formal solitude
For a week in flames
And the panic of being trapped
Inside a skull. A presence that moves through
Distortion, through bodies and through
Big bright mind today, white-throated
Sparrow on chains of utterance rides
Right into the window and dies instantly.
If song is invisible is it perceivable
To those who have dissolved
Into air? Every organism
Produces some kind of signalº
To move among and according
To voices the living make in bodies
In the intermediate state
Of having bodies – a mouth
Or thighs for rubbing song
Shapes the waves we’re in –
Releasement through the ears into glistening
*
I’m inside your language
Cut with its rhythms, half
Awake, spreading into the alley
Into the air where the mind is spatial
Muteness is a matter of curiosity that first
Returns things, the dawn correspondence
Spatialised arousal, have you seen mine
Thought is a circulatory system
Of which my mind is a node
That speaks the muscularity
Of this, and the colour
Needed a throat to sing
And a throat needed someone &
For some reason it needed me who
Could not really sing, for the air to move
Through is what I mean by song
Then I awoke in my differentiated body
And I had work to resist. I love work
And if sex is as hilarious as you make
It sound I will go looking for it
In the trees, looking in the air of fucking’s
Joke around which swims all other things
*
I came with my vocal sadness
To the bend in the alley
In the raging dawn to dissolve
In the fabric of utterance
Rhythmically looping sound
Through bodily circuitry
To study resonance’s helix
Insane with ergonomics I leak into air
To ask you to dissolve something
I may never be able to explain
In these elongations of mind
Into audible time
So I came with my problem to
The dawn, it seemed like the place
*
Tuesday, presence fields overlap
In waves
Travelling through waves. Sound
Is an apparition I rely on –
Elaborate vocal rolls roll through me
Extend you small bird through
Space. Concentric enunciation
Your soundbody enfolds me –
So are you small or are you all of space?
Intermediary airy flesh I slip into
Your vocal folds, soak my I in plenitude
And when I couldn’t speak
You spoke steadily, electric blue, my brain enflamed
Words
Meant very little, foreign, sharp. Speech seeks a border
To eradicate
*
A sparrow in my throat-
Damped song or regular
Unmarked proclivity for verbal
Pleasure, a rosiness
In your chest enfolds me, the dawn
Vomiting song in rivulets of mouthy
Warpings, genuflections
Rhythmic head
Bird language seams between
Utterance and architecture
In verbal pulses, concentric
Presence. A crease increasing
Older folds is the day appearing
Into the day, is another
In your songbody enfolded
In the day’s prism for brains
Speaking is a ray – say it, say
Body’s no discrete killable finitude
Where speech goes there you go
On the long tongue of mind
Music extrudes you. Speech-soaked, mutely
Concentric head
*
Muteness is about grief it seems to me now
A phase of it
That’s incoherent, there’s another phase where
The clarity
Just cuts. I’m listening to you because you bring
These phases together, or because
You sing through walls you sing on my head
You personage of space, shimmering there
Who I did not not see. Bewildered I wade into
Your utterance erupting, related by air
And time, related by a song, wading through throats
Related
By wind and time (the same wind
Rode)
I’ve been watching a vine form elaborate decisions
All along
The balcony. Every vibrant need exerts
A force
Its body are decisions. Its body are transportation
I stupidly wept
Writing an email to my dad. I stupidly
Wept
During a Zoom reading, too close and too far
Everyone
From my enormous buckling
Face
*
I is a node in a flickering fabric
Language, long songs, leisure
Move through walls, states
Vestibules, spiked ledges
Trees that elaborate around the
Life so life can go on thinking and
Have a place to hide. The soft vibrations
Of the female zhouu zhouu zhouu
While the male has no subtlety
Schweeep schweeep. They like it.
The cats in their predatory
Morning slinking get no relief
I’ve seen. I worry I’m reinjuring
My brain with this relentlessness
Needing to stop when I can’t stop.
But I just think that’s true, which is
Part of the injury unrelated to the
Impact. Attempting to ‘take a break’
And read something unrelated I try
The Tibetan Book of the Dead which
In the original Tibetan is called The
Great Liberation by Hearing in the
Intermediate States. The intermediate
States being: waking, dreaming
Meditation, the time of death
And the two successive phases of the
After-death. A concussion is somewhere
Between all of these
A word is a wave, and a song
is the weave
The weave is long. A song a long way
A word song way
*
I remember parties that cured me
A spontaneous wealth
Arising amidst bodies
In regular rooms accelerating
Polyvocal, kinked
A true party was not often
Found in peopled rooms
Those mysticisms of conditions
Marriage of true minds
Sluicing around before
The dawn’s language
Of birds enters
Thought thresholds
Seeking audience with the dawn
And the first thing I noticed
Was each morning
Raged so differently
On Friday you bleat
Experimental jokes
This party moves in waves
Of chat through evergreen
An ash that was
Sunday is muted, violet, flowing
Tree to tree, delicate bird work
On sung fabric of space of
Day’s opening keeps us
Here querying the air in sapphic
Vocables, so the sun rises
Your speech manifests as Monday
On chains of utterance from a cedar
A neighbour sneezes and vanishes
To the shifting light, parallaxing
The opposite of rock or song
Is liquid rock is goo
Becoming early
In a home distributed
From Guyana to Alaska, all this way just
To shag on the power lines, last year’s
Grapevine, the tattered cedar
You really love. Visibility is
The smallest part about you
An envelope for organs
To carry through the air
Speech is the process in which you live
Through walls, through anything solid
To trouble, any border to debunk
*
Hearing is nearness is open
Feeling
Vesicle of the possible thought
Rearing
Sameness and solitude organise
Revealing
Architectures stolen in maximum
Daylight
Reason resists almost everything
Noteworthy
*
The mind is drugs
That’s the premise of this study
That’s the thing, that’s the lack
That isn’t here, in the air – help
I could ask the birds for
The mind is a sparrow in the grapevine
Carrying a length of plastic sheeting in his beak
A bird, a never-ending nerve
Elongating thought across the sky
Through verbiage into vocal foliage
The mind is a minor power of the
Sun tending an amnesia
As I step into the weather of your
Speaking
Birds are people who travel
The wave inside brain sun –
Shines the meeting is time
Spun from sun –
All of this saying
Is about saying
And if I could
And how I would
And when I did what I
Said was speak to me
LANGUAGE OF THE BIRDS
“I was unspeakable so I ran into the language of others.”
– Kathy Acker
Bright sentience of morning comes
Out of a concussed cloud –
Hypnotising on its radiant surface
The mind is a complex formal solitude
For a week in flames
And the panic of being trapped
Inside a skull. A presence that moves through
Distortion, through bodies and through
Big bright mind today, white-throated
Sparrow on chains of utterance rides
Right into the window and dies instantly.
If song is invisible is it perceivable
To those who have dissolved
Into air? Every organism
Produces some kind of signalº
To move among and according
To voices the living make in bodies
In the intermediate state
Of having bodies – a mouth
Or thighs for rubbing song
Shapes the waves we’re in –
Releasement through the ears into glistening
*
I’m inside your language
Cut with its rhythms, half
Awake, spreading into the alley
Into the air where the mind is spatial
Muteness is a matter of curiosity that first
Returns things, the dawn correspondence
Spatialised arousal, have you seen mine
Thought is a circulatory system
Of which my mind is a node
That speaks the muscularity
Of this, and the colour
Needed a throat to sing
And a throat needed someone &
For some reason it needed me who
Could not really sing, for the air to move
Through is what I mean by song
Then I awoke in my differentiated body
And I had work to resist. I love work
And if sex is as hilarious as you make
It sound I will go looking for it
In the trees, looking in the air of fucking’s
Joke around which swims all other things
*
I came with my vocal sadness
To the bend in the alley
In the raging dawn to dissolve
In the fabric of utterance
Rhythmically looping sound
Through bodily circuitry
To study resonance’s helix
Insane with ergonomics I leak into air
To ask you to dissolve something
I may never be able to explain
In these elongations of mind
Into audible time
So I came with my problem to
The dawn, it seemed like the place
*
Tuesday, presence fields overlap
In waves
Travelling through waves. Sound
Is an apparition I rely on –
Elaborate vocal rolls roll through me
Extend you small bird through
Space. Concentric enunciation
Your soundbody enfolds me –
So are you small or are you all of space?
Intermediary airy flesh I slip into
Your vocal folds, soak my I in plenitude
And when I couldn’t speak
You spoke steadily, electric blue, my brain enflamed
Words
Meant very little, foreign, sharp. Speech seeks a border
To eradicate
*
A sparrow in my throat-
Damped song or regular
Unmarked proclivity for verbal
Pleasure, a rosiness
In your chest enfolds me, the dawn
Vomiting song in rivulets of mouthy
Warpings, genuflections
Rhythmic head
Bird language seams between
Utterance and architecture
In verbal pulses, concentric
Presence. A crease increasing
Older folds is the day appearing
Into the day, is another
In your songbody enfolded
In the day’s prism for brains
Speaking is a ray – say it, say
Body’s no discrete killable finitude
Where speech goes there you go
On the long tongue of mind
Music extrudes you. Speech-soaked, mutely
Concentric head
*
Muteness is about grief it seems to me now
A phase of it
That’s incoherent, there’s another phase where
The clarity
Just cuts. I’m listening to you because you bring
These phases together, or because
You sing through walls you sing on my head
You personage of space, shimmering there
Who I did not not see. Bewildered I wade into
Your utterance erupting, related by air
And time, related by a song, wading through throats
Related
By wind and time (the same wind
Rode)
I’ve been watching a vine form elaborate decisions
All along
The balcony. Every vibrant need exerts
A force
Its body are decisions. Its body are transportation
I stupidly wept
Writing an email to my dad. I stupidly
Wept
During a Zoom reading, too close and too far
Everyone
From my enormous buckling
Face
*
I is a node in a flickering fabric
Language, long songs, leisure
Move through walls, states
Vestibules, spiked ledges
Trees that elaborate around the
Life so life can go on thinking and
Have a place to hide. The soft vibrations
Of the female zhouu zhouu zhouu
While the male has no subtlety
Schweeep schweeep. They like it.
The cats in their predatory
Morning slinking get no relief
I’ve seen. I worry I’m reinjuring
My brain with this relentlessness
Needing to stop when I can’t stop.
But I just think that’s true, which is
Part of the injury unrelated to the
Impact. Attempting to ‘take a break’
And read something unrelated I try
The Tibetan Book of the Dead which
In the original Tibetan is called The
Great Liberation by Hearing in the
Intermediate States. The intermediate
States being: waking, dreaming
Meditation, the time of death
And the two successive phases of the
After-death. A concussion is somewhere
Between all of these
A word is a wave, and a song
is the weave
The weave is long. A song a long way
A word song way
*
I remember parties that cured me
A spontaneous wealth
Arising amidst bodies
In regular rooms accelerating
Polyvocal, kinked
A true party was not often
Found in peopled rooms
Those mysticisms of conditions
Marriage of true minds
Sluicing around before
The dawn’s language
Of birds enters
Thought thresholds
Seeking audience with the dawn
And the first thing I noticed
Was each morning
Raged so differently
On Friday you bleat
Experimental jokes
This party moves in waves
Of chat through evergreen
An ash that was
Sunday is muted, violet, flowing
Tree to tree, delicate bird work
On sung fabric of space of
Day’s opening keeps us
Here querying the air in sapphic
Vocables, so the sun rises
Your speech manifests as Monday
On chains of utterance from a cedar
A neighbour sneezes and vanishes
To the shifting light, parallaxing
The opposite of rock or song
Is liquid rock is goo
Becoming early
In a home distributed
From Guyana to Alaska, all this way just
To shag on the power lines, last year’s
Grapevine, the tattered cedar
You really love. Visibility is
The smallest part about you
An envelope for organs
To carry through the air
Speech is the process in which you live
Through walls, through anything solid
To trouble, any border to debunk
*
Hearing is nearness is open
Feeling
Vesicle of the possible thought
Rearing
Sameness and solitude organise
Revealing
Architectures stolen in maximum
Daylight
Reason resists almost everything
Noteworthy
*
The mind is drugs
That’s the premise of this study
That’s the thing, that’s the lack
That isn’t here, in the air – help
I could ask the birds for
The mind is a sparrow in the grapevine
Carrying a length of plastic sheeting in his beak
A bird, a never-ending nerve
Elongating thought across the sky
Through verbiage into vocal foliage
The mind is a minor power of the
Sun tending an amnesia
As I step into the weather of your
Speaking
Birds are people who travel
The wave inside brain sun –
Shines the meeting is time
Spun from sun –
All of this saying
Is about saying
And if I could
And how I would
And when I did what I
Said was speak to me
Erin Robinsong is a poet and interdisciplinary artist working with ecological imagination. She is the author of Rag Cosmology (Book*hug, 2017) and Wet Dream (Brick Books, 2022), both winners of the AM Klein Prize for Poetry. Her readings and performances have been presented by the More Than Human Life (MOTH) Festival, The Architectural Association School of Architecture, Toronto International Festival of Authors, OFFTA Live Art Festival, Fierce Festival, Blackwood Gallery, and more. Collaborative dance works with Andréa de Keijzer and Hanna Sybille Müller include This ritual is not an accident; Facing away from that which is coming; and Polymorphic Microbe Bodies. A PhD candidate at Concordia University (Montreal), Erin’s research-creation work focuses on regenerative, relational and embodied poetics.
BY ERIN ROBINSONG
LANGUAGE OF THE BIRDS
“I was unspeakable so I ran into the language of others.”
– Kathy Acker
Bright sentience of morning comes
Out of a concussed cloud –
Hypnotising on its radiant surface
The mind is a complex formal solitude
For a week in flames
And the panic of being trapped
Inside a skull. A presence that moves through
Distortion, through bodies and through
Big bright mind today, white-throated
Sparrow on chains of utterance rides
Right into the window and dies instantly.
If song is invisible is it perceivable
To those who have dissolved
Into air? Every organism
Produces some kind of signalº
To move among and according
To voices the living make in bodies
In the intermediate state
Of having bodies – a mouth
Or thighs for rubbing song
Shapes the waves we’re in –
Releasement through the ears into glistening
*
I’m inside your language
Cut with its rhythms, half
Awake, spreading into the alley
Into the air where the mind is spatial
Muteness is a matter of curiosity that first
Returns things, the dawn correspondence
Spatialised arousal, have you seen mine
Thought is a circulatory system
Of which my mind is a node
That speaks the muscularity
Of this, and the colour
Needed a throat to sing
And a throat needed someone &
For some reason it needed me who
Could not really sing, for the air to move
Through is what I mean by song
Then I awoke in my differentiated body
And I had work to resist. I love work
And if sex is as hilarious as you make
It sound I will go looking for it
In the trees, looking in the air of fucking’s
Joke around which swims all other things
*
I came with my vocal sadness
To the bend in the alley
In the raging dawn to dissolve
In the fabric of utterance
Rhythmically looping sound
Through bodily circuitry
To study resonance’s helix
Insane with ergonomics I leak into air
To ask you to dissolve something
I may never be able to explain
In these elongations of mind
Into audible time
So I came with my problem to
The dawn, it seemed like the place
*
Tuesday, presence fields overlap
In waves
Travelling through waves. Sound
Is an apparition I rely on –
Elaborate vocal rolls roll through me
Extend you small bird through
Space. Concentric enunciation
Your soundbody enfolds me –
So are you small or are you all of space?
Intermediary airy flesh I slip into
Your vocal folds, soak my I in plenitude
And when I couldn’t speak
You spoke steadily, electric blue, my brain enflamed
Words
Meant very little, foreign, sharp. Speech seeks a border
To eradicate
*
A sparrow in my throat-
Damped song or regular
Unmarked proclivity for verbal
Pleasure, a rosiness
In your chest enfolds me, the dawn
Vomiting song in rivulets of mouthy
Warpings, genuflections
Rhythmic head
Bird language seams between
Utterance and architecture
In verbal pulses, concentric
Presence. A crease increasing
Older folds is the day appearing
Into the day, is another
In your songbody enfolded
In the day’s prism for brains
Speaking is a ray – say it, say
Body’s no discrete killable finitude
Where speech goes there you go
On the long tongue of mind
Music extrudes you. Speech-soaked, mutely
Concentric head
*
Muteness is about grief it seems to me now
A phase of it
That’s incoherent, there’s another phase where
The clarity
Just cuts. I’m listening to you because you bring
These phases together, or because
You sing through walls you sing on my head
You personage of space, shimmering there
Who I did not not see. Bewildered I wade into
Your utterance erupting, related by air
And time, related by a song, wading through throats
Related
By wind and time (the same wind
Rode)
I’ve been watching a vine form elaborate decisions
All along
The balcony. Every vibrant need exerts
A force
Its body are decisions. Its body are transportation
I stupidly wept
Writing an email to my dad. I stupidly
Wept
During a Zoom reading, too close and too far
Everyone
From my enormous buckling
Face
*
I is a node in a flickering fabric
Language, long songs, leisure
Move through walls, states
Vestibules, spiked ledges
Trees that elaborate around the
Life so life can go on thinking and
Have a place to hide. The soft vibrations
Of the female zhouu zhouu zhouu
While the male has no subtlety
Schweeep schweeep. They like it.
The cats in their predatory
Morning slinking get no relief
I’ve seen. I worry I’m reinjuring
My brain with this relentlessness
Needing to stop when I can’t stop.
But I just think that’s true, which is
Part of the injury unrelated to the
Impact. Attempting to ‘take a break’
And read something unrelated I try
The Tibetan Book of the Dead which
In the original Tibetan is called The
Great Liberation by Hearing in the
Intermediate States. The intermediate
States being: waking, dreaming
Meditation, the time of death
And the two successive phases of the
After-death. A concussion is somewhere
Between all of these
A word is a wave, and a song
is the weave
The weave is long. A song a long way
A word song way
*
I remember parties that cured me
A spontaneous wealth
Arising amidst bodies
In regular rooms accelerating
Polyvocal, kinked
A true party was not often
Found in peopled rooms
Those mysticisms of conditions
Marriage of true minds
Sluicing around before
The dawn’s language
Of birds enters
Thought thresholds
Seeking audience with the dawn
And the first thing I noticed
Was each morning
Raged so differently
On Friday you bleat
Experimental jokes
This party moves in waves
Of chat through evergreen
An ash that was
Sunday is muted, violet, flowing
Tree to tree, delicate bird work
On sung fabric of space of
Day’s opening keeps us
Here querying the air in sapphic
Vocables, so the sun rises
Your speech manifests as Monday
On chains of utterance from a cedar
A neighbour sneezes and vanishes
To the shifting light, parallaxing
The opposite of rock or song
Is liquid rock is goo
Becoming early
In a home distributed
From Guyana to Alaska, all this way just
To shag on the power lines, last year’s
Grapevine, the tattered cedar
You really love. Visibility is
The smallest part about you
An envelope for organs
To carry through the air
Speech is the process in which you live
Through walls, through anything solid
To trouble, any border to debunk
*
Hearing is nearness is open
Feeling
Vesicle of the possible thought
Rearing
Sameness and solitude organise
Revealing
Architectures stolen in maximum
Daylight
Reason resists almost everything
Noteworthy
*
The mind is drugs
That’s the premise of this study
That’s the thing, that’s the lack
That isn’t here, in the air – help
I could ask the birds for
The mind is a sparrow in the grapevine
Carrying a length of plastic sheeting in his beak
A bird, a never-ending nerve
Elongating thought across the sky
Through verbiage into vocal foliage
The mind is a minor power of the
Sun tending an amnesia
As I step into the weather of your
Speaking
Birds are people who travel
The wave inside brain sun –
Shines the meeting is time
Spun from sun –
All of this saying
Is about saying
And if I could
And how I would
And when I did what I
Said was speak to me
LANGUAGE OF THE BIRDS
“I was unspeakable so I ran into the language of others.”
– Kathy Acker
Bright sentience of morning comes
Out of a concussed cloud –
Hypnotising on its radiant surface
The mind is a complex formal solitude
For a week in flames
And the panic of being trapped
Inside a skull. A presence that moves through
Distortion, through bodies and through
Big bright mind today, white-throated
Sparrow on chains of utterance rides
Right into the window and dies instantly.
If song is invisible is it perceivable
To those who have dissolved
Into air? Every organism
Produces some kind of signalº
To move among and according
To voices the living make in bodies
In the intermediate state
Of having bodies – a mouth
Or thighs for rubbing song
Shapes the waves we’re in –
Releasement through the ears into glistening
*
I’m inside your language
Cut with its rhythms, half
Awake, spreading into the alley
Into the air where the mind is spatial
Muteness is a matter of curiosity that first
Returns things, the dawn correspondence
Spatialised arousal, have you seen mine
Thought is a circulatory system
Of which my mind is a node
That speaks the muscularity
Of this, and the colour
Needed a throat to sing
And a throat needed someone &
For some reason it needed me who
Could not really sing, for the air to move
Through is what I mean by song
Then I awoke in my differentiated body
And I had work to resist. I love work
And if sex is as hilarious as you make
It sound I will go looking for it
In the trees, looking in the air of fucking’s
Joke around which swims all other things
*
I came with my vocal sadness
To the bend in the alley
In the raging dawn to dissolve
In the fabric of utterance
Rhythmically looping sound
Through bodily circuitry
To study resonance’s helix
Insane with ergonomics I leak into air
To ask you to dissolve something
I may never be able to explain
In these elongations of mind
Into audible time
So I came with my problem to
The dawn, it seemed like the place
*
Tuesday, presence fields overlap
In waves
Travelling through waves. Sound
Is an apparition I rely on –
Elaborate vocal rolls roll through me
Extend you small bird through
Space. Concentric enunciation
Your soundbody enfolds me –
So are you small or are you all of space?
Intermediary airy flesh I slip into
Your vocal folds, soak my I in plenitude
And when I couldn’t speak
You spoke steadily, electric blue, my brain enflamed
Words
Meant very little, foreign, sharp. Speech seeks a border
To eradicate
*
A sparrow in my throat-
Damped song or regular
Unmarked proclivity for verbal
Pleasure, a rosiness
In your chest enfolds me, the dawn
Vomiting song in rivulets of mouthy
Warpings, genuflections
Rhythmic head
Bird language seams between
Utterance and architecture
In verbal pulses, concentric
Presence. A crease increasing
Older folds is the day appearing
Into the day, is another
In your songbody enfolded
In the day’s prism for brains
Speaking is a ray – say it, say
Body’s no discrete killable finitude
Where speech goes there you go
On the long tongue of mind
Music extrudes you. Speech-soaked, mutely
Concentric head
*
Muteness is about grief it seems to me now
A phase of it
That’s incoherent, there’s another phase where
The clarity
Just cuts. I’m listening to you because you bring
These phases together, or because
You sing through walls you sing on my head
You personage of space, shimmering there
Who I did not not see. Bewildered I wade into
Your utterance erupting, related by air
And time, related by a song, wading through throats
Related
By wind and time (the same wind
Rode)
I’ve been watching a vine form elaborate decisions
All along
The balcony. Every vibrant need exerts
A force
Its body are decisions. Its body are transportation
I stupidly wept
Writing an email to my dad. I stupidly
Wept
During a Zoom reading, too close and too far
Everyone
From my enormous buckling
Face
*
I is a node in a flickering fabric
Language, long songs, leisure
Move through walls, states
Vestibules, spiked ledges
Trees that elaborate around the
Life so life can go on thinking and
Have a place to hide. The soft vibrations
Of the female zhouu zhouu zhouu
While the male has no subtlety
Schweeep schweeep. They like it.
The cats in their predatory
Morning slinking get no relief
I’ve seen. I worry I’m reinjuring
My brain with this relentlessness
Needing to stop when I can’t stop.
But I just think that’s true, which is
Part of the injury unrelated to the
Impact. Attempting to ‘take a break’
And read something unrelated I try
The Tibetan Book of the Dead which
In the original Tibetan is called The
Great Liberation by Hearing in the
Intermediate States. The intermediate
States being: waking, dreaming
Meditation, the time of death
And the two successive phases of the
After-death. A concussion is somewhere
Between all of these
A word is a wave, and a song
is the weave
The weave is long. A song a long way
A word song way
*
I remember parties that cured me
A spontaneous wealth
Arising amidst bodies
In regular rooms accelerating
Polyvocal, kinked
A true party was not often
Found in peopled rooms
Those mysticisms of conditions
Marriage of true minds
Sluicing around before
The dawn’s language
Of birds enters
Thought thresholds
Seeking audience with the dawn
And the first thing I noticed
Was each morning
Raged so differently
On Friday you bleat
Experimental jokes
This party moves in waves
Of chat through evergreen
An ash that was
Sunday is muted, violet, flowing
Tree to tree, delicate bird work
On sung fabric of space of
Day’s opening keeps us
Here querying the air in sapphic
Vocables, so the sun rises
Your speech manifests as Monday
On chains of utterance from a cedar
A neighbour sneezes and vanishes
To the shifting light, parallaxing
The opposite of rock or song
Is liquid rock is goo
Becoming early
In a home distributed
From Guyana to Alaska, all this way just
To shag on the power lines, last year’s
Grapevine, the tattered cedar
You really love. Visibility is
The smallest part about you
An envelope for organs
To carry through the air
Speech is the process in which you live
Through walls, through anything solid
To trouble, any border to debunk
*
Hearing is nearness is open
Feeling
Vesicle of the possible thought
Rearing
Sameness and solitude organise
Revealing
Architectures stolen in maximum
Daylight
Reason resists almost everything
Noteworthy
*
The mind is drugs
That’s the premise of this study
That’s the thing, that’s the lack
That isn’t here, in the air – help
I could ask the birds for
The mind is a sparrow in the grapevine
Carrying a length of plastic sheeting in his beak
A bird, a never-ending nerve
Elongating thought across the sky
Through verbiage into vocal foliage
The mind is a minor power of the
Sun tending an amnesia
As I step into the weather of your
Speaking
Birds are people who travel
The wave inside brain sun –
Shines the meeting is time
Spun from sun –
All of this saying
Is about saying
And if I could
And how I would
And when I did what I
Said was speak to me
Erin Robinsong is a poet and interdisciplinary artist working with ecological imagination. She is the author of Rag Cosmology (Book*hug, 2017) and Wet Dream (Brick Books, 2022), both winners of the AM Klein Prize for Poetry. Her readings and performances have been presented by the More Than Human Life (MOTH) Festival, The Architectural Association School of Architecture, Toronto International Festival of Authors, OFFTA Live Art Festival, Fierce Festival, Blackwood Gallery, and more. Collaborative dance works with Andréa de Keijzer and Hanna Sybille Müller include This ritual is not an accident; Facing away from that which is coming; and Polymorphic Microbe Bodies. A PhD candidate at Concordia University (Montreal), Erin’s research-creation work focuses on regenerative, relational and embodied poetics.