BERNEVAL

Richard Siken. Crush

And you can hear the sound of the waves in this bit from “Seaside Improvisation”

and maybe a mouth sounds idiotic when it blathers on about joy

and then “Visible World” throws upon onto the shore

     The light is no mystery
the mystery is that there is something to keep the light
                                                                                            from passing through

it could very well be that the blathering on about joy and the blocking of light arise from the same impulse — to transcribe the sensation of contact

your breath on my neck like a music that holds
my hands down, kisses as they burn their way
along my spine — or rain, our bodies wet,
clothes clinging arm to elbow, clothes clinging
nipple to groin — I’ll be right here. I’m waiting.

what I like about this suggestive passage in “Saying Your Names” is the unmentioned but sensed or anticipated clinging of the lovers — all that the words really offer is the delectable detail of the clinging clothes: the sartorial drench.

longer bits are required to appreciate the music that builds from the small bits repeated like a soundtrack (from No 24 from “You Are Jeff”

You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you don’t even have a name for.

here the contractions contribute to the words slipping over the experience almost imperceptible from being (you’re) to having (you’ve)

and a passage from which we glean the title to this blog entry

Here is the cake, and here is the fork, and here’s
the desire to put it inside us, and then the question
behind every question: What happens next?

from “Snow and Dirty Rain”

And so for day 1582
13.04.2011

He describes a river:

The spate had a channel from the high heather
to the estuary and its runway of water
where running salmon crowded like memories.

He describes the run of fish:

It was hard to think that these stale pools
could host the urgent passage of warriors from the sea.

Here’s a fancy ending to a poem entitled “A Discovery” which is sure to warm the heart of the postmodern nerd.

I held my pace steady in my aloneness
and never looked back until now, to revise
that favourite valley into a stage for eyes
and to realize how happily I walked
into the script of my own occasion.

And later in the same book a choice bit of dialogue or a bit of reported speech of Poppy with her interlocutor Harry (though he remains silent and likely smiling) … an occasion in a sequence devoted to the art of angling and to capturing the nuances of a landscape.

‘Harry, have you taken my stuff again
for those flies of yours, have you?’
So she chided him in good humour.

‘You’d better catch some trout next time!’

The red fly was christened Poppy’s Fancy
and it proved successful that year
in Spring for brown trout.

All these glittering bits captured from Seán Lysaght The Mouth of A River.

And so for day 1581
12.04.2011

from 28/03/01

Shutter Speed Check
	horizon
holds for poses a rest from stopping
	zone
holes for pauses stopped. iris click root
	horizon zone

somehow the picture of a flower emerges

And so for day 1576
07.04.2011