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So enfolded in lines
don’t be so a-feared! even the elbow grows its own arm of heat

The scene hovers there, even below the threshold. The canvas is full of holes. Yet just as much as anatomy presses into itself, into constant suspicion, the tension of the apertures betray a chink of distinct sensation. An oval is a wink. Twinned lines are formed in desperation. Alliterative movement sweeps from one end of the dream to the other. A series of figures are laid out. Sets, with any number of common features. Always caught. Every torso feeds into a bulbous head, or near enough, which then feeds into a comb of stubbed extremities. These bodies are hard, yet may once have been soft, even fluid. Free to be elongated flat, pinched into persuasive points. At this stage all thoughts are of excess. Surfaces are freshly ground. The eyes are hot under blanket lids, coverings designed to slant the features for internal view. If the head is rendered transparent, it forms a corpus; if the predicament is rendered transparent, all the better. To be cast with glass globes inset equals the possession of zeros in bone. Rest easy, for one is buoyant. If it were to keep moving this way, the room tones might stack up too, closing off spaces now being scraped through. How far the eyes have shifted already, ticking in each bowl, their muscle mechanisms lifted from the insects. This is saccadic infotainment, even while we sleep. At this rate, any caught expression might be partially reserved, memorised, proposed to be piled upon others in order to magnify,

even interpret. Yet a whole range of roundels—modestly convex and ornamented according to the Doric, the Tuscan, with hinges stepped (for laurel), vectors pinched at midpoints or on the cone—suggests persistence. This feeling for objects is involuntary. The sensations are lined up in a fashion that recalls stones spread evenly, covering as much of the ground as can be managed, maintaining an even covering whilst avoiding any possibility of contact, let alone layering. The image then sweeps into that, more fully: the risk of a partitioned floor—the whole surface of the earth!—raising into brick. This is a philosophical problem, as if thoughts, so festooning this darkness, were to be distributed on a single plane, a ‘spread’ that underlies an endless, untidy banquet of the senses. Yet sleep has its own textures, just as objects start to adapt and grip the skin. Objects learn to adhere to space. Looking over another squad of roundels, landscapes folded into civilised scrawls, it appears that lozenges of otherwise inconsequent space bring outlines closer, sharply redrawn, as the rest of the provided space fizzes into obscurity. A notional correspondence between a circle and a square inexplicably turns to an infantile concern for the ratios between a flat surface and a perforating detail. The field is in sharp analysis. Anxiety germinates. At least one chance to wake is missed. Quiet buoyancy resumes.