Article 3

Monique Lyle

à la plage


              somebody said how he began to write from out of a place 
of sadness. The bald globe looking out onto rocks and he did for 
hours a day.                Somebody found it possible to imitate 
ocean in the poem. Amidst the sea spray and the grey.                   You 
saw a wave rise in the distance. It came up to you and crashed making 
surface out of shine.                           The aftermath is ghost-crab trails and 
a chorus slightly airborne. Overall the effect was phosphorus. There was 
an overall effect of corpus.                                         And it wanted you to 
come so bad that you dove off into the sea.          The feeling matched 
the way you wanted to come too.            The chorus was there in the 
surf and wet breasts in the spume. A small naked figure was there and a 
gecko in the wet. There was an outer and an inner membrane.             Tiny 
petals of salt accrued, the grey growing across the lens. You wiped it. It 
had been spread out over.                         She said something swam 
through the smog. Seaweed swam through the smog.                   Two of them 
stood looking down and at their reflection—shy and with eels. They 
were miming crossing on backs of turtles and on shells.         A marionette 
and a figurine no larger than a shell stood in the distance in seagrasses. 
                    It was laughing about the turtles and wondering whether or not 
to kill the crabs.                         Late that night you could glimpse the two 
reclining on the river, sucking sweet meat, red and naked.
           Oh we got houses onto our back and went up the hill in echoes. The 
seagrasses were so tall that we chose to climb. Night and moon and stars 
shone on our skin. And our skin shone with the climb.                      We were 
beautiful. We looked. The shell cracked. Crayfish, shrimp, krill, woodlice and 
barnacles flew out and all around. We sunk into the river. We bumped 
against each other.                   She said épargner was a green bean and écart
a shell.                           She said how the ones with reflections were 
down there on the sandy court—the three but in teams. The little one with 
yellow hair was sitting in the sky. The little one on the surface strawberry blonde.
                     A man baby went across the surface to place itself on you. It 
was so warm and soft. You put a towel around it.          There was a memory 
of toile—stars splashed across the sky as she gestured a stroke. As a 
bottlebrush came down and made salt spume from crests.               The great 
insouciance of subjects looked upon. She wept.                 They had already 
seen her reclining on shells on sand under toile. They had already seen 
her put écart to oreille and listen to ocean. And listen to spume. And
listen to spool.                           She was unable to be woken.        She said 
neonates as blinking dinosaurs and dopey droplets when coming out
of that ocean. When coming off that spool. When coming from that 
spray.                         They all looked. It undulated.

Monique Lyle is a PhD candidate in literature and philosophy at Western Sydney University. Her current research concerns dance and Enlightenment aesthetics. She has a history in performance, and has published on the subject of dance in Nietzsche's oeuvre.
 
 
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