w h i t e k n u c k l e
PAVILION
Owen Vince
this is a
white knuckle chapbook
copyright 2016 by Owen Vince
for white knuckle: Howie Good and Dale Wisely
design by Dale Wisely
Contents
Author’s Statement
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Owen Vince
Owen Vince
PAVILION
a prose poem sequence
Author’s Statement
In architecture, the pavilion is a temporary and permanent construction which continues and sustains itself into a host of possible futures. It is an empty box that is filled, emptied, and refilled, where the pavilion's envelope, its structure, is unchanged—permanent. PAVILION is a short experiment in filling and vacating continuing structures—the box-like prose poem—written while housesitting, in the rural mountains, in a landscape and a house that were unknown to me, which I came to, lived in, and left unchanged.
Owen Vince PAVILION
white knuckle chapbooks
“any point [of]
a rhizome can be
connected to
any other, and
must be”
deleuze and guattari
Owen Vince PAVILION
white knuckle chapbooks
I.
Today I began speaking before my mouth was fully open. There are words which sound the same whether they are made with the tongue held down or flexed. I was bent like a tongue's larva, an unsexed flower. I was watching how the snows of the mountain's side fainted and bowed their dizzy heads together. It's as if great weight were being lifted from them, and then I too rose up, shielding my eyes.
Owen Vince PAVILION
white knuckle chapbooks
II.
Three months ago I began walking into the ash forest on my hands, and when I stopped walking I found the forest was a year younger. The house also speaks with its mouth closed; its windows cast faint and dismal lights into the sky—they do not describe the shape of the windows so much as obscure the stars. It's not really their light that interests me.
Owen Vince PAVILION
white knuckle chapbooks
III.
Now, about those trees—Rilke thought he saw, in the spaces between them, the work of the sublime. Between these trees I stamp the gunk from my shoes, breathe gigantic clouds into the air—they don't disappear so much as “switch off.” Become—how you say—less "real."
Owen Vince PAVILION
white knuckle chapbooks
IV.
I refuse to wear my glasses—the sight of seeing so many leaves is painful. I refuse to wear my glasses and have no idea what my face looks like. I want to use my hands to describe the shape of my face. You watch me with a confused expression.
Owen Vince PAVILION
white knuckle chapbooks
V.
Tomorrow I will walk into the day after tomorrow. I will wake at five minutes to midnight to let the cat in, mewling like a bell. It is painful to be pushed through the dark. There is a single light that remains in the valley, though sometimes a blackness damps it. Probably the owner is rising to drink water from his sink.
Owen Vince PAVILION
white knuckle chapbooks
VI.
This morning I arranged my possessions on the table, though none pointed, emphatically, to me. Bachelard says it is "better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality." There is no cash here, no gracious graduation in black-tie. The waves of the water are final, bland, and shining.
Owen Vince PAVILION
white knuckle chapbooks
VII.
Light of the golden planet—it thrashes over its beaches. Things, like the horses' manes, that gather in the sea's foam, interrupt my dreams. Alone I want to push myself between pages, or bathe until my eyes are unfixed, and that my steps are unsteady—like a sleeper's, rising at midnight.
Owen Vince PAVILION
white knuckle chapbooks
VIII.
Now about the mice she brings in, and lets lie on the carpet. I have known enough of death, at a remove, to be thankless. Poetries should have no more than two arms. Poetry should be singular, like a perfect boiled egg that spills warm gold into the corners of your mouth—your tongue blurring like a whale's back as it rises and rises from the sound, and carries your language away with it.
Owen Vince PAVILION
white knuckle chapbooks
IX.
I have no love for tree branches or the way that fallen leaves turn the soil a different colour. I have no dreams except those I have always had, those dreams which are worn down like shoe heels or fingernails after a season of difficult lapses. I call her from a cabin on the horizon, and say the sky looks like somebody has shaken a bag of icing over the forest, has made it less real, mixed the trees from their horizon. I prefer things this way. I said, "Sorry?" She said, '"I prefer things this way."
Owen Vince PAVILION
white knuckle chapbooks
X.
I leave the country for good. I turn all of the lights off with my fingers closed. The coeval wrist of my arm is a four-lane of traffic. Its width is coincident with the width of the mist. The mist precedes the slow road to the mountain, to the trilobite gardens. The gardens were held under ice, and now the ice has shifted into a wet mar, an egg-broken, a dislocated pearl.
Owen Vince PAVILION
white knuckle chapbooks
Owen Vince PAVILION
white knuckle chapbooks
Owen Vince is a poet who also writes regularly on architecture and digital art. His work has recently appeared in Envoi, Fur-Lined Ghettos, and the Saló Press Anthology of Modern Surrealism. He runs Pyramid Editions.
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