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“This bubble had to be burst, & the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world & smash something.” The hotel heiress, snapped flashing her bum in a Bahamas club. To go right into the heart of the Arab world, they claim their device can trigger an orgasm: flashing her bum in a Bahamas club on a boozy date with her new bloke, Nick Carter. They claim their device can trigger an orgasm. American officials who spoke on condition of anonymity on a boozy date with her new bloke, Nick Carter, say he confessed under torture in Syria. American officials who spoke on condition of anonymity without touching a women’s genital area say he confessed under torture in Syria. “There’s no explanation why. We’re just not saying anything.” Without touching a women’s genital area, I take it all seriously. I am withdrawing from all representation. There’s no explanation why. We’re just not saying anything to make this objective absolutely clear. I take it all seriously. I am withdrawing from all representation, but he was in the special removal unit. To make this objective absolutely clear, the development of counterterrorism technologies— but he was in the special removal unit. This had profoundly shocked the commission, the development of counterterrorism technologies with the flick of a switch. Women get turned on. This had profoundly shocked the commission. No one detected any radical political views. With the flick of a switch, women get turned on to a new business model that only pretends no one detected any radical political views. I take it all seriously. I am withdrawing from all representation to a new business model that only pretends to give consumers more control. In fact, I take it all seriously. I am withdrawing from all representation that she refused to be photographed in body paint to give consumers more control. In fact, he was handcuffed and beaten repeatedly. That she refused to be photographed in body paint constitutes an integral goal of the IOA. He was handcuffed and beaten repeatedly. There’s no explanation why. An information whiteout constitutes an integral goal of IOA while Justice turns to Syria’s secret police. There’s no explanation why. An information whiteout. Forebodings of disaster enter into box scores while Justice turns to Syria’s secret police, constructing systems to counter asymmetric threats. Forebodings of disaster enter into box scores to achieve total information awareness, constructing systems to counter asymmetric threats. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to achieve total information awareness & smash something. The hotel heiress snapped.

The laughing gull that flew behind the fencepost and never came out was the beginning and then a hand smaller than my hand covered Wisconsin with a gesture for explanation. In the afternoon there are pauses between the words through which commas can grow like daisy fleabane. A fish with an osprey in its back emerges from the Sound and nothing can be learned by more analysis. The book of her hair opens to its binding and I leaf through the glorious pages of appreciation and that’s not all. We could not have turned fast enough to catch light and leftovers from so much of what happened: the swift figures behind you like a planet’s dark companion, ships entering and leaving the hall closet the real and imagined between which is no difference.

All Souls’ over, the roast seeds eaten, I set on a backporch post our sculpted pumpkin under the weather, warm still for November. Night and day it gapes in at us through the kitchen window, going soft in the head. Sleepwalker-slow, a black rash of ants harrows this hollow globe, munching the pale peach flesh, sucking its seasoned last juices dry. In a week, when the ants and humming flies are done, only a hard remorseless light drills and tenants it through and through. Within, it turns mould-black in patches, stays days like this while the weather takes it in its shifty arms: wide eye-spaces shine, the disapproving mouth holds firm. Another week, a sad leap forward: sunk to one side so an eye-socket’s almost blocked, it becomes a monster of its former self. Human, it would have rotted beyond unhappiness and horror to some unspeakable subject state—its nose no more than a vertical hole, the thin bridge of amber between nose and mouth in ruins. The other socket opens wider than ever: disbelief. It’s all downhill from here: knuckles of sun, peremptory steady fingers of frost, strain all day and night— cracking the rind, kneading the knotted fibres free. The crown, with its top-knot mockery of stalk, caves in; the skull buckles; the whole sad head drips tallowy tears: the end is in sight. In a day or two it topples on itself like ruined thatch, pus-white drool spidering from the corner of the mouth, worming its way down the body-post. All dignity to the winds, it bows its bogeyman face of dread to the inevitable. And now, November almost out, it is in the bright unseasonable sunshine a simmer of pulp, a slow bake, amber shell speckled chalk-grey with lichen. Light strikes and strikes its burst surfaces: it sags, stays at the end of its brief tether—a helmet of dark circles, death caul. Here is the last umbilical gasp, everybody’s nightmare parent, the pitiless system rubbing our noses in it. But pity poor lantern-head with his lights out, glob by greasy glob going back where he came from: as each seed-shaped drop falls free, it catches and clutches for one split second the light. When the pumpkin lapses to our common ground at last—where a swaddle of snow will fold it in no time from sight—I try to take in the empty space it’s left on top of the wooden post: it is that empty space.

Abandoned in a field near Yass a cobwebbed car once kept us warm and when it rained, though we shivered with sickness, there came a moment of perfect happiness, faces nestled in the vinyl, sleep coming on, surrounded by metal that in upcoming decades would oxidise to flakes. Asleep at last, last of the valium, we came to know a car too is a flower and pollen its decay. In the dry air at dawn the cicadas kept still. The space that mass sat in decided how mass was to move. We dreamed of valleys of olive trees, silver side out. The lions preened. We shivered with need. A mechanic showed me once how the spark-paths from spark-plugs looked, if you looked close enough, like mountain ravines from the air. The deeper the groove the faster the current. We shivered, this our habit, this flowing. It takes the breath away. There are gum trees crackling from it two decades later. I slept so still beneath that mass of dreams like sediment compressed beneath a lake. I woke and the tributes and glory were gone and the crops all withered and money was merely the index of anxiety. When we realised this our hearts swelled in exultation. Even time would forget there was reason for fear: that decay seemed to will itself upon us. I was off the air, delirious with substance. The kite hawks grew ashamed. All nature squirmed. I was off the air, light-headed with voracity. The theme just kept repeating itself, year in year out, same demon different bodies. A nurse said When you stay, when you leave those wet imprints in our airspace, these sheets smell like formaldehyde, like death. We had merely reached early, down the end of the river, the leprosarium of feeling, and all things stood for every other thing, creepers, vines, tendrils, anacondas, inert surrender, such listlessness, and yes the very rage with which we chased the very forms of it, the lineaments of nothingness, the powders of the comatose, the bliss. This was the state of the world. Heading backwards we learned the flea-fish was the smallest animal before the insect kingdom began. Forwards, there were only the sudden deaths of galaxies. And yet when we practised love there seemed on certain days an awful lot of space; and so much sky. Never had I lain then at Kangaroo Valley so comfortable in my own body. A virtual flatness and that centrifuge in the stomach stilled and my spine a spirit-level. The smell of coffee drifting in brought back to me that lily-white girl and that sad hour of need. How brittle every bone was then. How could one not be completely bedraggled by time or compulsion or duplicity? I was all those things and am. I was so tired with the not-being-here inside of it all that fatigue was like oxygen, given of all the givens, sensurround of the gods. But I was gulping and heaving by then. And that is all so long ago. Though when you forget the last time: most likely it is not the last time. And when dreams don’t come, when mastodons and minotaurs curdle in the night-reaches and the bulls lie fallow in dawn-sweats: sleep some more. Wait. Sleep on. And swim.

And if every step taken is a step well-lived but a foot towards death, every pilgrimage a circle, every flight-path the tracing of a sphere: I will give myself over and over. I have migrated through Carpathians of sorrow to myself heaped happy in the corner there. Nothing seemed strange in the world, you’ll understand— nothing ever more would. Monkey Boy came to me saying Look—the moon of the moon. The little one circled the big one. He crouched in the palm of my hand, tiny, sincere, pointing at the sky. There was something sad about him. The python was nothing, nothing at all, nothing but strength shed to suppleness, nothing but will encased in itself. The python was a muscle of thought. Coiled and mute, in a place where nothing but rain fell, the python thought: this is the beginning or end of the world. The python was everywhere, everywhere at once, aware only too much of that ageless agony: its existence. I am tired, it said; and the stream burbled by. I am waiting for the recoil, the uncoil, coil of night, coil of stars, coil of the coldness of the water. The python said Who are these people? The whole city sweated, moved like a limb. The air fitted like a glove two sizes too small and too many singers sang the banal. The bars roared all night. The kite hawks grew ashamed. All nature squirmed. In the yellow time of pollen there’s a certain slant of light that devours the afternoon, and you would wait forever at the Gare de l’Est, if time stood still, if she would come. She is the leopard then, its silvery speed; where will you wrestle her, and in what shadows, and on what crumpled sheets? And all those sheets were pampas and savannas, the soft expanses of all that would be absent forever, all that was past, and future, and not here. And in a white rose there were not to be found any secrets, since in its unfolding there was no centre, nor in its decay. Only the random petals fallen. In the yellow time of poppies when the fields were ablaze those invisible pollens rained around us. The days held us lightlocked in golden surrender and all night long the night shot stars. When my chest unconstricted at last, did yours? The real issue, of course, was this: atomically, energetically, everything was wave function. And a wave continues forever into space, the wavelength never alters, only the intensity lessens, so in the worst cosmic way everything is connected by vibrations. And this, as even a dog would know, is no consolation. Ah but the dogs will save us all in the end & even the planet. Not the superdogs but the household friendlies, always eager to please, hysterically fond, incessant, carrying in the very wagging of their tales an unbounded love not even therapists could imagine; their forgiveness unhinges us. We were reduced to this: this day and night, primary gold and indigo, the binary profusion of distances guessed at, heat and cold, colours logged in the retina and lodged in the spine; we were dogs who knew the infinite is now, that celandine was buttercup, that buttercup was marigold. The dog star marked the dog days and the wild rose was dog rose. The crow’s-foot was wild hyacinth. By day the correspondences were clear. I walked across the whin land. Speedwell bluer than sky. A practised ear could hear, between two breaths, deep space wherein the mind collects itself. Words foundered and cracked.Nearly never bulled the cow. A shining isomorphousness rang out. The roussignol sang all night. All colours were shuffled endlessly but never lost. A practised ear could hear, between two breaths, the secret blackness of the snow come flooding in. On summer’s lawns the ice-melt sprayed its figure-eights from sprinklers. And everything stopped working, second time around, as if it had never happened before. Fans moved the corpses of fireflies through the rooms, supplicant, pathetic, pleading in brittle postures. Everything was magnified by their bug-eyed deaths. We became solemn in that profusion of dying. Cane toads fattened the asphalt in the mist and the rain; our headlights caught them tensed as if listening: they were waiting, mute, for the imbecility of eternity. The clocks merely pulsed, or rather the days. Like shotgun spray on the weatherboard, sleep scattered itself through the blurred heat and secreted itself in the nooks of delirium. Sometimes the magpies would wake us, or the phone, mid-afternoon. And we needed nothing, not even hope, being no different from the dragonflies, or the cows in their despair. It appeared we lived on sunlight and chocolate bars. You blossomed so from not ever reading the newspapers. Things came and went—the years and all the airports. I was a shade scattering my shade seed liberally to the winds and weathervanes. There was not enough absence to go round. I heard voices,stabat mater, in the whine of jets and in air vents and headphones a stream trilling over rocks. On tarmacs and in transit I saw your lips, your nakedness, the trees, that dappled light. I dreamt of orchards. The preciseness of the world came flooding in.

In the yellow time of pollen, in the blue time of lilacs, in the green that would balance on the wide green world, air filled with flux, world-in-a-belly in the blue lilac weather, she had written a letter: You came into my life really fast and I liked it. When we let go the basket of the good-luck birds the sky erupted open in the hail of its libation; there was a gap and we entered it gladly. Indeed the birds may have broken the sky and we, soaked, squelched in the mud of our joy, braided with wet-thighed surrender. In the yellow time of pollen near the blue time of lilacs there was a gap in things. And here we are. The sparrows flew away so fast a camera could not catch them. The monkey swung between our arms and said I am, hooray, the monkey of all events, the great gibbon of convergences. We were falling towards each other already and the utter abandon to orbits was delicious. The falcon rested on the little man’s arm and falconry was the High Path of the World. Whole minutes passed. We were falling and the jungle fell with us. She said I came, I came to my senses really fast and you liked it. I was surrounded by the fluttering of wings, nothing but a whirring in my ears, and the whole earth tilted and I lost my reason. For a time falconry was the high path of the world. At night the sky was filled with animals. Ganesh loomed large among those points of light. He said Change! and we said Lord we are ready to bend. Thou art the high exalted most flexible. He said Then I will enter into your very dreams. And the yellow-tailed black cockatoo, ablaze in his own musculature, soared all night above the sunlit fields of whisky grass that stretched inside me to a river’s edge. The great bird cawed its majesty, a sonic boom; and even I was barely welcome there. There was a gap in things; and all the lilacs bloomed. Words split in our grasp. We were licking the cream from the universal ice. Words foundered and cracked. How the bonnet was warm on your bottom! And the metal continued tick-ticking though the engine was off. And the evening shuddered, since everything is connected. I was licking the cream from the universal saucer. I was all of Cheshire and points between. You saw the great sky turn blacker, you saw the spray of stars and your hair got tangled in the windscreen wiper. At the hot ponds we stripped as night closed in. I secretly admired your underwear, your long elusive legs. In the spring where we lay side by side we held hands. Up above the steam the sky. I said That one is called Sirius or Dog Star, but only here on Earth. And when since the stories foretold it we parted, those birds were all released again. Such buoyancy. They go on forever like that. How else to say thank you in a foreign place? We are ever in the arms of our exile, forever going one way and the other though sometimes of course on a sphere that is not so bad. I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act. We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin. In the yellow time of pollen when the fields were ablaze we were very near bewildered by beauty. The sky was a god-bee that hummed. All the air boomed with that thunder. It was both for the prick and the nectar we drank that we gave ourselves over.

I put an animal on an animal which I put onto the animal I had already stacked on top of my first animal and stood back to appraise my work only it looked much too short despite the number of animals I had gathered, and I felt tired and silly and disappointed, slumping to my knees, rocking back onto my bum, then lying down to stare into the hoary sky until my eyeballs softened and I was forced by the consistent light to close them and listen to the animals taking a surprisingly long time to disorganize themselves.

In the back of the charm-box, in a sack, the baby canines and incisors are mostly chaff, by now, split kernels and acicular down, no whole utensils left: half an adz; half a shovel, in its broken handle a marrow well of the will to dig and bite. And the enamel hems are sharp as shell-tools, and the colors go from salt, to bone, to pee on snow, to sun on pond-ice embedded with twigs and chipped-off skate-blade. One cuspid is like the tail of an ivory chough on my grandmother's what-not in a gravure on my mother's bureau in my father's house in my head, I think it's our daughter's, but the dime Hermes mingled the deciduals of our girl and boy, safe- keeping them together with the note that says Dear Toth Farry, Plees Giv Me A Bag of Moany

We speak of the pain of childbirth, referring, of course, to the mother, but what is pain to the mother, the one through whose body the course unwinds? She understands already what kind of world she must return to, how it daily hones its many edges against human skin, unlike the child whose untried limbs inch toward it, pressing now so firmly against her he feels for the first time the pinch of bone against bone and is seared by the friction. Isn't he the one on whom the real burden falls, the one to whom resilience means nothing yet? His tender skin like a small measure of cloth unfolding before the blade under which he will, for a lifetime, bruise and heal: Crush of the long descent, grip of the steadying hands, brush of breath against cheek, even the constant barrage of the microscopic, the tiny plink-plink of the dust motes knocking against him before custom makes him numb to it. No wonder the startled mouth cries out, each pore suddenly hungry in the withering, nourishing light.

The sculptures in this gallery have been carefully treated with a protective wax so that visitors may touch them.