Sally Ann McIntyre


quarry / landscape within habitation

1:1

the light
is feathered, falls
from above as what
has happened, as event
from a proximate
distance is

happening, is
presentness, this
falling into : a body
in time, in oxygen, in
light, as these cells, into
no hand, not held

from below : falls
inside arrival, inside
becoming : inside the shock
of warmth, the radial arrangement
of event & memory, veinlike,
behind my ear,

fanned against
the drifting
hair threads : that
inverted filmic, that
sounding, falling
as pigeons tumbling

diagonally from the cliff
travel on radial
sun-spoke : the light
of skies when snow
appears : a whiteness
falling from speech, appears

1:2

it is almost too
much to know. to re-
member these

event
-ful days as
diagram, as want

in
this drive
-ing in to

particularity, in
-to occurrence. where
you lived, un-

stated before
your body wore
my breath

as border &
bare
-ly we

could go, & where
is there
to

, here
now we. are no
where, but what

we are become
-in immensity
of sky as shore-

line of sleepless
light, as
waxy, falt-

ering mid-
broadcast, witness
-ing, attentive

to this
(icarus?) as
any bird

missing,
declared
flame



to the other patterns, as over (drawn)

wings, or
something close to hand

word centre
because nothing closes

the hand on
the fragile facings

face to face, appreciate shallows if taken
as water, or

wind moves
words, motivating the throat

in torsion of trees, or
space covered freely

in secret with
cold, shining

and sufficient resistance in form
something always said more

where this memory sings
rifting works

easy,
not to solve the light



Quail Island / the sirens have been remaindered

at the edges of whatever
can be attended to : ordinary
sky over

orderly macrocarpa : the lack
of perceptive
limit, over

this unwalled line of sea
stones, as
the ear : stacked

against the unending lack
of a word, or line
of words, is

the edge of whatever
can be languaged :
they are not (quite)

bricks, & the sky’s lending
library, full of wrecked
systems (persistent

repetition of cirrus
phrases : seeming to fan
out from something

prior, indecipherable),
admits its gaps
without arrogance,

shelves this eye’s
openness at mid-
air’s deaf

point : to browse,
half-Whitmanic,
half-shattered

along these introduced
avenues, in the green
exuberance

this gift is : its space
of not-knowing
is a mouth :

is, the misc.
silences (lengthened, as
breath) between

the noon shadows, the memes of
stated trees. but whose freedom
is it? it is a sky

i do not always know
what to do with (how to deal
with : as the ships’

graveyard knows
implicitly : the quiet
rust into oblivion

within the day’s
greater attention,
as metal flakes

restate themselves
to the ocean’s
equal blood-taste)

the sirens have been remaindered from sally ann mcintyre on Vimeo.

"...a sound piece based on a reading of this work (and some field recordings taken in Seacliff Lunatic Asylum - where Janet Frame was almost leucotimised before she won a prize for her short story collection - and violin)..."

Australian by birth (Hobart, 1974), and currently residing in Dunedin, New Zealand, Sally Ann McIntyre's poetic work has appeared in literary journals such as Aught, Landfall, Otoliths, Moria, Meanjin, Masthead, Cordite, Going Down Swinging, Poetry New Zealand, Trout, Sport, and others, since 1997. In 2008 she was recipient of a Creative New Zealand New Work grant for Literature. She also works with experimental sound and radio, programming the Mini FM station Radio Cegeste as a mobile, site-specific, project-based platform for transmission art. Recent projects have included a six week residency as New Zealand Department of Conservation artist in residence on Kapiti Island, an isolated, bio-secure offshore reserve for the country's rarest endemic birds, and a series of lathe-cut 7" records extending, via individual locked grooves, the 2 minute memorial radio silence broadcast 1 week after the Christchurch earthquake of 2011.
 
 
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