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NATHALIE STEPHENS |
from The Sorrow And The Fast Of It
_____
Nails me to
this unnamable.
Not a theology of place. Not a masquing
of remembrance. Not a
fortitude.
Nothing as disabled, as damaged, as that. We wish for.
The significances fall each to the ground. The promontory
ruins. The
leaning
bicycle. The chafed walls. The
painted rooftops. The feral sky (blue, and
blue).
All of which might be liminal. A
strained littoral. Won by water. Gagné.
Verging and caught up. A wildness in a city corridor. A blank.
A fill. An unwalled.
A failed
language in the place of a language that fails.
The awareness of a non-existent thing.
The readiness with which.
In the other book. The book for waiting. The book for what is lost in the
lost
place.
It is the foreignness of the word please in a mouth that
closes. In a
mouth
that masticates. Is the foreignness.
Isn’t me.
_____
We walk beside.
Here, there is the second time. Here, there is the
unsaid. Here, the
altercation.
After. It isn’t easy, like this, to make a tracing of
an unrecorded. Of a
next
thing.
I find a way to say. In multiplied passagings.
The country of
abandonment.
The river of wreckage. The lines and
lines for retrieving. The
many forwardings. Like this undressing myself in a public place.
The doors flung
open.
The oceans unabated. Rising a wall a wall rising an
immediacy of counter
and
restrain. A doubt that widens into a body larger than every other body and it
presses
down and it makes everything small that was big to begin with in the
very
middle of what is intended to be wrong.
We didn’t say: We will try
again.
Nor: Ask me instead.
Try as we
might we rise and we rise. The whole of everything
beneath
us.
_____
Now there is a sadness.
(Is it good to say : is a sadness ?) It is in the distance between the
spent
place.
In the hill that would be colline. In the mouth that
says awkwardly prosim.
A rail line
crossing a bordered ground. The hands
circling around a shared flame.
The sadness
that might be in the curvature of l’anse.
What is cove. What is
coveted.
Covered. What a folded skin makes of scar. A rivulet for cut. A deep rut.
And this is its outpouring.
This is its gut. All pustule. All magotted and fussed.
An ended thing. Looked up.
_____
I warn the masterpiece
against its bigotry. I warn the beast against a verge of
ville.
I make myself flat in a field for wintering. I score the crossed-out text for
lack.
I lead the human to its walled-in dream. I claim a fake history. I show my
skin
off. I eat colourful things. I make the light dim. I watch from a sealed
window.
The mouth is
in ruin. The words are copied out a hundred times. I make
the chalk mark on the sidewalk in three differences. I do the other time. I
stall on
an underside.
Say aloud this
time : We are as ugly as we mean to be.
_____
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