BERNEVAL

Way earlier in the sequences

between kisses
now no one can clearly recall
the colour of silence
before the alphabets intersected

A long ways toward the end, in fact the last words to the last of the last

it will have been
an idea of flight and passion
light in breaking waves of time
sea as volume
in the alphabet and the present

Nicole Brossard Ardour translated by Angela Carr

The word “alphabet” seems to stand in for the world of language but we are none too sure of this metonymic interpretation. It could all be a set of letters before coalescing into words.

And so for day 1872
28.01.2012

The ending of “Not Without” in Mark Doty’s Deep Lane stretches the word order so that the reader is invited to linger and puzzle over the word order and the linkages between the elements.

Even that. Endless gratitude,
for the thing I would without be no one I know.

It is the absence of commas that intrigues. It reminds me of a passage in Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” where commas and assorted punctuation abound.

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he’d rather marry.

It took me a while but that second “orange” finally registered in my brain as a proleptic positioning of the adjective to modify the cobbler’s bench and awl. Marry for money? Marry rather than burn? All we readers are left with is a character without — no money, no marriage, but a nicely decorated shop.

And so for day 1871
27.01.2012

George Miller. 30 (some odd) poems. Toronto: Three Tree Press, 1977.

“Padraig O’Broin”

[…]
In the tundra between the lines
we eye each other guardedly

“John of Glasgow”

[…]
There is still among the dying
more life than among the dead

[…]
star blood
         earth bone
part light
         part stone

[…]
Our breath hangs in the air
like evidence for the soul
and there are countries we
have not seen which will taste
like crisp apples
when we go to them
in the morning

Ever alert to the traces of life and its enjoyments in a land of cold.

And so for day 1870
26.01.2012

George Miller. 30 (some odd) poems. Toronto: Three Tree Press, 1977.

Conclusion to “Gambit”

[…]
He practised madness
in front of his mirror
and when the mirror broke
he found he had perfected it.

A male version of “The Lady of Shallot” and its “mirror crack’d from side to side”?

And so for day 1869
25.01.2012