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Lynmouth, Watersmeet, the time the water pump packed up in a cloud of steam. We left the car and walked down towards the gorge. The rivers were in flood. We were both so angry.
Watching two rivers meet, we caught the rush, were silent, kissed, didn’t want to talk. This water worked: the car was all words water wanted to resist, like tension and torque.
The RAC man came and went, came back and began to remanufacture flow. We stood in that valley soaked in whitenoise, in drenching mist, trying to understand.
Like a neutral card from Smiths Detail: Waterlilies (Monet) I leave this poem blank for your own message.
The recent discovery of Augusta Ada Lovelace's enigmatically self-titled "Mathematical Scrapbook", at the bottom of a trunk in the attic of an English country house, has brought to light this previously unpublished poetry. The style differs greatly from any of her known work but is believed to have been partially dictated by an obscure occult procedure.
The "Poetical Faery Engine" that she claims is author of the poems, through its application of Bernoulli Numbers to source texts, is unlikely to have ever existed. It is believed she wrote the poems herself during moments of distraction influenced by Mesmerism. The supposed Engine is likely to have been an invention designed to exonerate her from the production of poetry, an activity frowned upon by those closest to her.
WAYWARDNESS, BEAUTY & INTANGIBILITY BERNOULLI NUMBER 76
The black dwarf is black tonight; poor father, if my poor father had but possessed me; wayward, marvellous, electrical &c, &c we could twine like an ampersand, the subject of Force Circulating. Poor, black, intangible father. His comely-looking ghost has transmitted to me its ugly game of human solitaire. Now I am under the dominion of the black dwarf and together we celebrate the Sabbath Mathematically. Not A.A.L.
WILL ' O ' THE WHISP [sic] BERNOULLI NUMBER 74
This is not your A.A.L., your Avis Phoenix, your prescient Bluestocking Augusta speaking to you. The black dwarf has a new language requisite to furnish bird plumage for the purpose; say marabou feathers mixed with silver corn. Pray dress up your affectionate Avis Phoenix, little bird, so when you bring her earthwards with the usual crimes, she'll be underlined like a body under the abstraction of the Electricity.
ONE THEORY OF THE MODE OF ACTION BERNOULLI NUMBER 72
Even the sprites & faeries at one's elbow, in one shape now & the next dissimilar, fear Him who is so darkly known in the world; who has me commit the same crimes; done thro' the night of my life behind the green curtain. In maroons and puces I court another sense; I am under the dominion of electricity where faeries cannot mitigate the transmission of genius & sprites hold out most strange & dreadful hidden realities. Mesmer: decode.
MORAL PERCULIARITIES BERNOULLI NUMBER 70
There are days when I am literally underlined; the Astrologer at Dulwich could see it; as if I had died, an intuitive perception echoed I dare say in my Phrenology. These random Frankensteins, self-made, as even this, pre-eminently vibrate in an increasing ratio, an unlikely run of backed winners more curious than I can tell you. Such engineered intercourse with a Lord as in due time shall machine a Poet.
DEVIL OR ANGEL IT WATCHES BERNOULLI NUMBER 68
More of the crystalline & less & less of the nebulous form, your puzzle pate breaths (no purely mortal lips). You are saying "I am now going out on horseback", while I have a Spell; you leave me your Fairyism; you ink it all over for me later, fairy similies in a madwoman's hand, automatic, when the machine deserts me and I'm you again, unwell, very pale & a dull heavy mortal!
UNSUSPECTED, EVEN REPRESSED BERNOULLI NUMBER 66
Behind the green veil: feasting & flirting in luxury & ease. I have taken much pains father, to get thro'. Here comes in the intrigante & the politician! I, poor little Fairy in your service, mind & limbs! Deliver to me tout suit plus vête! Your poetical surrogate in
violet velvet; your c for the work & duties for you & the engine here lucidly demonstrated.
DEVELOPPED [sic] BERNOULLI NUMBER 64
Bernoulli runs thro' bubble science & bubble nature, enough to be seen in all real and natural genius. See how it shapes me, it's surely meta-analytic, my own Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, pent-up! Unknown! But coming thro'! I could even call it a translation; mathematics turning into a thing, the verbal & symbolic representative; carrying on an infinite chain of deductions. This I know. These are the seeds of destruction, within me.
A SINGULAR FUNCTION, IN VERY DEED! BERNOULLI NUMBER 62
A million successive additions +, +, +, &c, &c, &c very amply analysed; this ampersand machine in the great laboratory of my unspoken libido; pain a million times over & over. Oh father I fear not your almost awful energy; let it stand, pithy & vigorous. I go over it again and again like the proofs I revise, I can't leave those wiry little spooks of mine alone! I have a Spell!
In this slow booming heat, the moon floats like an impossible ice cube. As the dregs of the sun glance sideways, the moon is buoyed in a floodlit pool. Why should I tell you this? For the pleasure of recognition? There's nothing new here. Some arbitrary Roman stood the same heat and saw the same impossible moon and thought of the pleasure of ice.
The moon is melting. Today its ice is even more impossible than before. I recline among Romans who pick their teeth and wait for entertainment. The mind that thinks of ice sees a blade of grass and thinks of war, sees the sun set and thinks of blood, sees an empire die and raises a glass to the new empire.
When I next drop ice into Bombay Sapphire, I don't think of the moon. I think of the associations I make every day as if they're new, as if they're not echoes of old atrocities. Then I wash them through with juniper.
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