Lesley Harrison

from Pia Arke's exhibition Arctic Hysteria at Greenland's National Museum & Archives, Nuuk, 2010 i. I am in my body. I am here, in front of you. I am the temperature in this room. I am undressed in my nudity; I am the light and shade you feel. I am more like other people than like you. I have before and after. I am my self, entirely and only. My outside and inside are continuous. I am muscle, organ, fluid, bone. I am monumental. You are the only one who sees me. ii. I am not naked as I am; I am naked as you see me. I am transparent, almost visible. I have a time and a place. I am tribal and exotic. I must always carry objects. You are heroic. I am a complete museum, the story of my own making. I am a mirror to you; you are reflected in the looking at me. At best, I mimic you. You write me. When you leave, I will no longer exist. iii. I am a single conscious point. I am indifferent. I am unself, like a photogram. I am prehistoric, before definition. Your body falls over me. I have depth and luminescence. I am neither here nor there; I have infinite extension. I live inside the lived world, the light and dark inside my head like dream substance. I am camera obscura, the room itself. I both adore and resist.

Outside outside myself there is a world, he rumbled, subject to my incursions —William Carlos Williams, Paterson i. impossible. sterile extrusion the rigour of its beauty its crumpled geometry worked to defeat. light, stopped. locked in its form shuttered and windless in dry rifts, split, furrowed, mottled, creased. ii. trundling bulging from behind, its too heavy body its natural carapace shelving green, sinking the sea beneath it the difficulty piling up, rising to the surface. iii. swirling backward on blue flowering currents rolling up sudden, in spray and mist —like the turning of a page that leaves us blinded for a second— unlocked in a milky scum half hid, long on its axis growing open wounds of violet, emerald, silver. a point of astonishment. lapses of silence. air.

GUITH a greylag morning, the sea a conscious blue. CALF SOUND orca in a sea blue room, breathing pearls that rise to the surface. GROATHA the plenum of the shed: every part infilled with flutter, glass, sheep turd, gusts of damp. GREENTOFT gunshot punctures a field of geese, their clackety rise a flock of helicopters. THE SETTER STONE an old man steps out of the ground all lines and angles, sun snagged in his beard. MILLCROFT a tree softened house: red willow, alder, pine, eucalyptus rooting. WARNESS a stream hole a pure, dense fall; one ocean falling into another. PLANTATION wren, silver lark, crow woody snipe, curlew, hen hawk day owl, starling. SOUTH END the Varagen, beaded with spotlights curves through the dark round great holes in the sea WARD HILL climbing with the moon, the wind blowing round my mouth— a low note, like an owl.