Issue 15: Mike Saunders
Monument to OS
55.9889 x -3.4310
From the north travel trees in depleted clusters
and folds, divided through isometric perspective.
What was previously a forest or a wood
becomes an elaborate swatch. Follow this
into movement, at a remove, through
differentiations of green, a knife-like transition,
into a present at odds with its evolution. Today
Inverkeithing constantly and actively funnels
between multiple striking and paralysing inboxes
while commuters egress at speed over Inchgarvie.
What remains is a type of spine, in a process
of constant replacement, structured
within an unsustainable network. Not for the first time
motion is measured within friction, or guesswork.
58.6698 x -3.0612
In specific detail crouched
against foreign weather, to mark terrain,
surrounded by canvas and the warm
hoarse breath at night from three sides,
poles above. Slice into existence
a previous triangulation.
Kept instead of a diary what
once was never described this way,
in degrees, in rock structures,
in erosion and whatever
can be seen from here:
what looks like a sheer drop
from the south is an ever flattening plateau
from the northeast.
58.6874 x -3.5663
Continue with disorganised spirit,
a somnolent & ragged flag,
through variations: sleep,
long arm of day, double dream
of amalgamation. Left
soot. Left unerasable traces
(experimenting with height)
from a bird’s eye view (if birds
saw perspective not as angled
but as planar, a loose tube,
threaded not like cotton but
like a screw). Diagrammatic plates
held in rusted place as if permanent:
as if in a variation of permanence.
Mike Saunders' work has been featured in a number of recent publications, and a pamphlet, Detent, is forthcoming from Gatehouse Press. He is currently writing about land and money and water. He runs indianlitter.tumblr.com with Angus Sinclair. He lives in Edinburgh.
