J. R. Carpenter
I am here. and there is nothing to say. no words in the bedrock. or in the near bank. or in the river even. the water a rush of nothing I know the language for. and on the far shore. a loose assortment of nothing I know the name of.
if among you there is a wish to get somewhere. you may wish. to leave any moment. if among you there is a morning. of stone cold. silences. and fingers. and corals. frozen in time. what cold requires is. that I leave off lecturing. what stone requires is. that that I go on walking.
push over a boulder. and the pushed reveals another. an entertainment of the relative significance of fossil found in bedrock. as opposed to fossil found in cobble. a discussion of the relative knowing of birds identified by song. as opposed to birds identified by sight. song is not silent. even if we are not speaking.
stones are not nothing. even if we are now crawling. over cobble covered with silt. nothing produces a surface and speaks some other language. shall we discuss this later?
could we simply decide the names for these marvels? or agree. to none. to put no name. to know no thing. to refuse. to organise. to lecture on. or in. this space of time. lecture on whatever you like.
there are silences we want to do away with. there are stones that help make silences sink. into nothing. there are silences that let stones think. attach to any one stone any one thought. it falls down easily. I have nothing to say. and I am saying it. and that is poetry. as I need it.
J. R. Carpenter (she/they) is an artist, writer, researcher, and lecturer in the School of English at University of Leeds. Her work asks questions about place, displacement, climate, and colonialism across performance, print, and digital media. https://luckysoap.com/ Instagram: @jrcarpenter