When I was in school, I went through a phase of being obsessed with dead things. I used to go looking, camera in hand, for a bit of roadkill or a squashed insect. In retrospect I can see why people thought I was a bit odd. It wasn’t just that there was a certain kind of conceptual beauty in death, which I did and still do believe, but something particularly about the form of it. I was interested in the materiality of death. When a body had been mangled or morphed completely, contorted into something alien. It filled me with awe in its awfullness.

when I opened my eyes

then

you were different

as if some other form

of you

had tried to squash itself into

your body

now you were misshapen

bumpy

your mouth spoke words

I couldn't understand

your hands held gifts

I didn't know how to recieve

unknowable

your touch wrote messages

that I couldn't read

‘The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.’

only then

did I realise

that the stone

The souls of the dead departed westwards over the sea with the setting sun.

When I was 15 my best friend's dad shot himself. I spent the following days in her house. It was busy with people coming and going like changing tides, dressed in blackness and sorrow. A few of us stood by, aimless, speechless and hopeless in the thicketed grief. I never really knew the right thing to say so I just stayed. We sat side by side in silence and sadness, the air heavy.

Too young to really understand: too old not to.

How do you cope with loss?

Finger sandwiches

Lukewarm tea

And biscuits

Heart stops beating, air leaves the lungs.

A permanent, irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain a living organism. It is an inevitable, universal process
that eventually occurs in all.

‘One cannot bathe twice in the same river because already, in his inmost recesses, the human being shares the destiny of water. Water is truly the transitory element. It is the essential, ontological metamorphosis between fire and earth. A being dedicated to water is a being in flux. He dies every minute; something of his substance is constantly falling away. Daily death is not fire's exuberant form of death, piercing heaven with its arrows; daily death is the death of water. Water always flows, always falls, always ends in horizontal death. In innumerable examples, we shall see that for the materializing imagination, death associated with water is more dream-like than death associated with earth: the pain of water is infinite.’

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost: 22

Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: 6

A translucent bulbous body sits afloat
fibrous fluid limbs, deadly, dragged toward depths

Tinted violet

Liquid violence

Once upon a time, as we swam together, a man of war tried to kill you

It was one made of multiples. A colony of common goal

Their aim of protection held your destruction

Mourning is about dwelling with a loss and so coming to appreciate what it means, how the world has changed, and how we must ourselves change and renew our relationships if we are to move forward from here. In this context, genuine mourning should open us into an awareness of our dependence on and relationships with those countless others being driven over the edge of extinction . . . The reality, however, is that there is no avoiding the necessity of the difficult cultural work of reflection and mourning. This work is not opposed to practical action, rather it is the foundation of any sustainable and informed response. Grief is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying; human beings must grieve with, because we are in and of this fabric of undoing. Without sustained remembrance, we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think. Like the crows and with the crows, living and dead “we are at stake in each other’s company.’

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: 38-39

would never

bleed

I had been clutching

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