Field Observations

after Liu Chuang’s Bitcoin Mining and Field
Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (2018)

 

 

The spinning wheels glow neon-green. Water

released from the mouth of the dam roars over

the bolted edge into the reservoir. We mine energy;

 

we disconnect from the pod and emerge, newborn

and knowing. Time hurtles down dimly lit corridors,

a cat’s ears rotate unthinkingly to the origin of sound.

 

Strings of copper cash now worthless. People rush to exchange

them for trays of rotting persimmons. Melt metal in the furnace,

cast copper into a series of hanging bells. The King struck one:

 

its thin reverberations blurred the air, travelled up his hand into

his body, and stopped his heart. A mountain woman sings songs

of her ancestors into the mouthpiece of a computer held in one hand.

 

We hear music, and coloured bulbs light up in tandem. A white man

stalks a black crowd; he collects their cadences for an ivory grave.

Telegraph wires divide whole forests; they cannot bear our human weight.

 

Unbelonging

 

I also am a daughter of the colony.

I share their broken speech, their other-whereness.

    – “Colony”, Eavan Boland

 

You laugh at my speech.

Even my name is wrong.

My tongue will not bend.

I cannot read these titles;

I do not speak these words.

 

I wake myself in the dark, talking.

I stand in the garden, facing the sea.

The north wind tugs at the wet fabric

in my hands. I peg it firmly:

the shirt is a trapped, white flag.

 

If an ancestor had continued south,

what then? A market garden, goldfields,

a laundry, the family restaurant. Not this

bloodless mining of words, this stymied pen.

 

Verse

 

Every smallest thing is too much for me.

     – Monica Jones, in a letter to Philip Larkin

 

The roast in the oven grown cold

The empty bed

 

Her hair on your coat

No letters for weeks

 

Rain all day

The garden near drowned

 

The lost cat

Its collar worn through

 

A broken glass

Wine on the carpet

 

The mirror last night

Pages of a book

 

I build a fire

Your handwriting collapses

 

The gate fallen off its hinges

A rusted latch