Series Notes Contact Rehearsal Hotel
68.
two Dead rabbits / two stilllives songs /
hares on the mountain
Imogen Cassels
Found photograph, France,
circa 1950 to 1959.
two Dead rabbits / two still
hares on the mountain
Imogen Cassels
circa 1950 to 1959.
* * *
* * *
[...]
Freehand
A few days later I watch landscape for fire
the drag rhythm
staggered oxygen
and woof of heat. All the re-writes
of the lighted world.
How much do you want me to hurt you?
Your ribs don’t give under my hands,
but the mind slips, I think, anyway.
And the beam is a tripwire, that smirks
to blunt itself against a wall. I could make
anything possible, and feel the tug
of its double-edged pull as it widens. The well.
We share the day, dry scratch jasmine,
gleeful jump-ring, our separate
devotion to the same songbook,
faulty and switchy,
the brutish, infinite deferral of pleasure.
I keep my face inclined towards the earth.
Sometimes all of it is not enough. Even the proxy,
glittering barrette of morning, the tropopause
somehow waking before we do,
the early evenings wearing fig, cedar, de sade,
dancing. I promise, now, I am going
to get the rest of myself from over there,
just below the new line of the swifts,
tireless and lighter-hearted the last
animal without consequence black sparks
in the seeking air who are sorrowless,
sleeping way up beyond sight, on the wing-wing.
Joseph Beuys, ‘Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare,’ Detail
(Ute Klophaus, Düsseldorf, November 1965).
Trance states
1.
Turning out, past
the sonder lyric,
print of frankincense,
left by the servant’s church,
and you watch the deep
false water, for the blast
smoke show of the world.
There is a difference, a slender
ocean, which I visit
repeatedly, as if it might
furnish the answer I want.
I am an ideal receptor.
The sharp dust
fades to start over.
2.
The rain-pocked days
and my own gleam growing.
You say: spring street,
an idling motor, you love so much
the wayside flowers,
in and out of the simple shade,
by the rattle music
of the tracks. Awhile
I know she and I
are going over the same bridges,
under the same skies,
split through the shimmer of decades.
Our feet spin the common
dusk-coloured thread.
3.
And, I wonder, would
have cast the same, beaded nets,
tangling for circumstance.
The hours follow
each other and drown.
In alarum the birds
stagger the sweet morning,
the doomed and violent
motion of waking.
Wordless song is all
anyone could do,
met with a day,
rotted by light:
the onset of trance states.
4.
The years get better.
The years get better
and more difficult.
You work hard
to make movement
obey grace. Signs
accumulate, too,
which is the action
of signs. And the breast
divines in parallel
a heart, and breathes
over its latch, beneath
a sea-gown, making love
to employment.
5.
On a bright day
my eyes are pale
and therefore take on
more of the light.
It was like something
you might read
in Kerosene,
had she ever written it.
Shoulder slipping,
still flickered
in the mouth of instance,
the grey scales beginning
to animate and lift.
Ah you skirting wind.
6.
There is a wooden animal
tuned to itself, by
the arena of poplars
and weeping birch.
I will learn the constellated
sharps, and all the articulate
blackbirds of Berlin.
I believe my life is good.
I keep my love on the inside
of my flexor. The gap.
Ray of slightness,
pretty capo. I will know
the earth, the work
of sleep, the debris of sleep.
Order Cassels’ hares on the mountain from Tenement direct.
Imogen Cassels is the author of Silk Work (Prototype, 2025) and the pamphlets Peach machine (The Last Books, 2025), Chesapeake (Distance No Object, 2021), voss (Legitimate Snack / Broken Sleep, 2020), Arcades (Sad Press, 2018) and Mother, beautiful things (Face Press, 2017). She lives in London.
Back to Rehearsal.
A few days later I watch landscape for fire
the drag rhythm
staggered oxygen
and woof of heat. All the re-writes
of the lighted world.
How much do you want me to hurt you?
Your ribs don’t give under my hands,
but the mind slips, I think, anyway.
And the beam is a tripwire, that smirks
to blunt itself against a wall. I could make
anything possible, and feel the tug
of its double-edged pull as it widens. The well.
We share the day, dry scratch jasmine,
gleeful jump-ring, our separate
devotion to the same songbook,
faulty and switchy,
the brutish, infinite deferral of pleasure.
I keep my face inclined towards the earth.
Sometimes all of it is not enough. Even the proxy,
glittering barrette of morning, the tropopause
somehow waking before we do,
the early evenings wearing fig, cedar, de sade,
dancing. I promise, now, I am going
to get the rest of myself from over there,
just below the new line of the swifts,
tireless and lighter-hearted the last
animal without consequence black sparks
in the seeking air who are sorrowless,
sleeping way up beyond sight, on the wing-wing.
(Ute Klophaus, Düsseldorf, November 1965).
Trance states
1.
Turning out, past
the sonder lyric,
print of frankincense,
left by the servant’s church,
and you watch the deep
false water, for the blast
smoke show of the world.
There is a difference, a slender
ocean, which I visit
repeatedly, as if it might
furnish the answer I want.
I am an ideal receptor.
The sharp dust
fades to start over.
2.
The rain-pocked days
and my own gleam growing.
You say: spring street,
an idling motor, you love so much
the wayside flowers,
in and out of the simple shade,
by the rattle music
of the tracks. Awhile
I know she and I
are going over the same bridges,
under the same skies,
split through the shimmer of decades.
Our feet spin the common
dusk-coloured thread.
3.
And, I wonder, would
have cast the same, beaded nets,
tangling for circumstance.
The hours follow
each other and drown.
In alarum the birds
stagger the sweet morning,
the doomed and violent
motion of waking.
Wordless song is all
anyone could do,
met with a day,
rotted by light:
the onset of trance states.
4.
The years get better.
The years get better
and more difficult.
You work hard
to make movement
obey grace. Signs
accumulate, too,
which is the action
of signs. And the breast
divines in parallel
a heart, and breathes
over its latch, beneath
a sea-gown, making love
to employment.
5.
On a bright day
my eyes are pale
and therefore take on
more of the light.
It was like something
you might read
in Kerosene,
had she ever written it.
Shoulder slipping,
still flickered
in the mouth of instance,
the grey scales beginning
to animate and lift.
Ah you skirting wind.
6.
There is a wooden animal
tuned to itself, by
the arena of poplars
and weeping birch.
I will learn the constellated
sharps, and all the articulate
blackbirds of Berlin.
I believe my life is good.
I keep my love on the inside
of my flexor. The gap.
Ray of slightness,
pretty capo. I will know
the earth, the work
of sleep, the debris of sleep.
Order Cassels’ hares on the mountain from Tenement direct.
Imogen Cassels is the author of Silk Work (Prototype, 2025) and the pamphlets Peach machine (The Last Books, 2025), Chesapeake (Distance No Object, 2021), voss (Legitimate Snack / Broken Sleep, 2020), Arcades (Sad Press, 2018) and Mother, beautiful things (Face Press, 2017). She lives in London.
Back to Rehearsal.