Excerpt: 'Outplace' by Lital Khaikin
Stills from Woman in the Dunes, Hiroshi Teshigahara – interpreting Kobo Abe
From a small material is an orphan:
a grain of sand against skin is a planet – in precarious hold, tense with a perfect balance of
distance and attraction that lifts and moves, and sends a fragment spinning
the contents of a planet pour out of skin, an excess of being
each a heart at the mercy of being tossed against another
old time crystallizes into stillness, no soft bodies scattering into a suggestion
of ground, where there is no precise moment that the water turns to sand in line outside of
geometry, complicating reasonthat mute particles may be in some confidence with distance
that assures of reason and ends
where we remain outside of this knowledgewe know land in different ways, we do,
a variance written by the whims of winds and currents
the temperament of magnetism and the steady moods of the moon
a formula put to greater movements than our ideas may contain
it is a wonder that the elements show no sign of fatigue
could water ever feel the exhaustion of its ceaseless movement?
Excerpted from Outplace by Lital Khaikin, forthcoming.
