Kate Fagan is a Sydney-based writer and musician whose chapbook return to a new physics was published by Vagabond Press in 2000. She is the current managing editor of HOW2 magazine.





'Geophilosophy'

1.

Winter drags itself slowly across the interval occupied by a thought of sky. When I lean to name them,
clouds dissipate and suggest something else, felt as ineffable. Each node of thought beside an increase
of mattering, the mineral fact of pressing ourselves to the drying grass, the inevitability of our lips and
their exquisite gravity. The word terrain begins to unlock the perimeters of reason, returns a dream and
watchfulness, everything resolves into a method of composure held in a geometry borrowed from trees.
As if aquamarine, torn over by foam, collecting the wind, could become a way of thinking. A tiny insect,
its abdomen sectioned into red and turquoise bands, wings askew beside the edge of vision, confirming
the reach of a morning's desire. We let our eyes empty into sand, tensile, replete in care, spray hurled at
forty-five degrees along one prismatic face of interruptive rock. Each clod, nerve fibre, branching stem
or netted radical offers the idea of earth memory. Our seagull voices shrieking to the ridge, I am only the
stretch of your arms holding there, nothing to defy, cellular abrasion or the entry of salt water licking at
a membrane. Eagles wheel up, screaming a message of clear territory, seen by them, I witness your deja
vu or bird-becoming and reach out with charcoal on my fingers to respond again, leaving a trace on your
forehead that lasts only as long as the drafted space between breaths. Green algae thrown to beach beside
tender blue and silver fish, an idea of their beginning, evolute collisions marked in by footprints. Affinities,
learnt within these dense material systems, an immaculate bone replicates an entire submerged body, or a
path picked out over cliffs. We hope to abandon possession, rinse in scars. Nothing incorporeal, nothing
without linkage, sounding out a different scale of regard. The landscape is a somatic discourse, habitus is
disarranged. Another tide moves, right to this edge, red clay appears just as a squall folds in off a steel
horizon and your heels find a point of balance, embedded. Language in extreme generation and all scenes
saturate in story, shouldn't we behave as this, decide to uncouple from closing, and how? Cytoplasms
under scrutiny, asking in weather, uttering a rhythm of surroundings in pure and impure movement.


2.

Stem
unlock territ-
                          ories

besides
repainting the ledge,

dusting out words until
                            with barely
                                          line or two,             the core of
            a vaster, - existent

in disarray, tactile
                          as geometry

borrowed from
trees
                            a fact exquisite as

    y/our belly along grass,

                                                      stolen

lasting
im-pressures       algal spatter
scripting a beach,

                                          wrecked along the coast

stone appurtenance
                        this perpendicular         light vantage

slow recovery of
                      discoursing
              all bound,

(return to left
margin

cellular abrasion or the entry of salt water
                                                  licking at a membrane.