fred’s farm

yes this is a field of gunmetal glinting like weather
an entire ecology of dead thistles mapping a drought
barbs pain dull remembering poisons of beestings &
the skull-eye fits perfectly a climbing stick found hill-
side. let’s take a photo here of the air’s texture looking
down into damwater figure out some key property of
atomic nature the push of things against another. let
no one say that sheep can’t really move if encouraged
when it’s a distance issue the soundlessness is affecting
as a cinematic device. this dog resembles more closely a
seal than say a different dog & really the same is else-
where too. owls pocket into roofy line-drawings I’m
imagining that everything is a sketch or a story told
hundreds of times at the dinner table. (months ago
on saying I was interested in oral histories I was made
to feel oversexed and dead-keen on performing fellatio.)
rhubarb is a barometer of the times, heirloom parsleys
grow into mad reunions, tomatoes hang on tho pecked
into pumice. predictably all the wool smells of dinner
farmdogs bray fig trees are irrelevant bowsers like delta

collaborationism

opening out some office-tones hushy-grey
hard/soft metaphors & back-to-ham radios
, thwarting military commands glitching
some new masculine intimacies or love-talks
I’d order less milk for more tea and insist on
‘or’ as a consequential joining word suspending
two things in lateral flow attuning and framed

your code metaphor is very late-nineties
we’re yoking an idea of the body with one of
not-the-body, as if we ever got rid of ourselves
as if we ever felt that the body’s betrayal
was other than us. knitting circles aside newness
clots and curds, nouns set up suggestively as some-
thing more interesting, less servile

meta-sex talk tsk-tsk-ing, the chills / pink frost:
to collaborate is always already evident crumbing
against an Auckland dusk-light. it’s girlfriend in
a coma but without the irony. across the street cats
lope into themselves, into liquid ambers, as though
their limbs were patterning an ominous index
the easy analogy is this – there are bones in a

battlefield, settled into the seams of the soil &
all the conscientious post-bloodshed grasscover
– and the bones tell us a list of things about the
battle or any number of potential battles. brownian
motion (the path of a drunken bird; measured in
units of exquisite likeliness) and ordering peking
duck (quantities jotted on the underside of a napkin)

come to mind. our love, to put it crassly, is indexical.

cooking with stein, flo & benaud

for michael farrell

opening out onto a floured bench is
the dough, barely kneaded, just held
together with the blunt cuts of a butter
knife – the palms face-up but still
making slender butter. Flo Bjelke-Petersen’s

voice starchy and tea-towelly. the golden
rule of scone-making is to add the milk
gently – “milk me sugar” – “do not be
afraid” to add more if the mixture is dry:
the imperative voice, “soft not sticky”.

given the heat no one is expected to
exist near an oven and not sweat. it is
a simple causal relationship and
generally people are gentle about its
being true, or at least, being evident. when

a scone is brushed with milk – two fingers
miming, more or less effectively, a pastry
brush – it glosses up nicely. spread apart
they rise into each other, the extent can be
micromanaged with simple, kitchen-focused
mathematics:

algorithms hell-bent on decoding the
unknowable curvatures of a cricket ball –
“nice cherry” – and the ecology of baking
scone-nuts, clustered or spaced: “the
difference is spreading.”