Edges & Fray. Danielle Vogel

builds a floating nest

      a buoyant platform of rotting shrubbery

      moored to surrounding plants

      some books

      are likewise precarious

      I think of the organ-pipe wasp

      who frames long mud flutes to reside within

      they too are solitary . though sometimes

      two females may build side by side

      sharing a common wall

      as it accumulates ,

      sedimentary ,

      / thread by line --

      , sometimes sloughing off /

      sometimes not

      this book then ,

      weaving --

      eye

      a voice

      crosses this voice / / crosses

      nervous systems --

       lace

      the peripheral edge of a line

      temporarily amalgamated

      language’s ability

      to bond ,

      to create momentary enclosures

      - / -- / ---

      track the cellular regeneration

      of a sentence --- its rhizomic

      / branchings , its

      kinetic reoccurrences

      an unstable boundary : the body / the book

      how language inhabits a line that moves

      how it exists because of this instability

      \

      start by making a loose ball of words

      bind it with the cocoons of forest tent

      caterpillars . your saliva , a sphere around the ball

      filled -- with finer sounds / to line the cup

      of the mouth --- feathers -- - fur , pleats of

      lichen , language

      to press one’s body against this curve

      offer form

      to the problem

      -- and gift

      / of ethereality

      to gestate the body as it waits

      its own arrival

      that secret unsayable center

      I’ve watched a swallow scoop clay

      with its beak / deposit the silt

      against its nest

      even before the bird

      /

      belong to both . to others

      with their entire bodies

      writing is the retrieval

      of material ---- to produce a desired , shape

      as open : archiving

      the word architecture

      build within the space of this thought . sound , shaped into series becomes sentence and series ,

      consider environmental circumstance . consider mastication and regurgitation . consider function . consider weather . concealment . elongation . suspension and ductility .

      beginning to sew

      with its beak

      a weaverbird

      / eventually,

      a silken cable

      conjoins two leaves

      an opening

      purse :

      strands of sedge

      and reeds

      cattails on the shore

      of a grassy scrub, glow

      a red-winged

      blackbird

      low / among vertical shoots --

      soaked marsh vegetation

      stringy plant material

      woven to gather

      upright stems

      a platform / /

      wet leaves / decayed wood