Silk Fonts

Bronwyn Haslam

1
It’s fears dense and mesmeric that creep into a life at reveille, cereal time, as she questions conflict to come and as all mornings, in an unequalled queenly snap, slices baguette and brie. Its pendent upended movements pullulate, teem in esplanade’s febrile melee, its fevered parquets of trade center and stage. It’s a queued coiled duo, tense idem, a clone rule, a tenuous noise. It’s hesitations, corecries that cross somber avenues of fluent suede, shade and dust, attract and recall our legs, feet, tendons, joints, as desire needles, quoils up to top verbs, sentiments, sense, it’s simplicities prefixed, cell- , nano- or cyber-, glue to our pensées, float our neurons a moment so ideas seem aquatic and marvel us. Certainties that pelletised doses, pulverent, luminous, soon mix in our tears. Sequels steepened, sequence equaled, seeded minute quipu nodes educe reels of quoted sequin code to nestle Québec’s metered scene. It’s eerie unsettled sentiments composed of sores unreeled across deepened years and immense orisonts, it’s peeled elegies, blues ideas set up in the lieu mere being emotes, menaces to sever our breath from our throats or reeve out in fever. It’s duelled oneness, a ruled pun, deciduous tongues quoted, untied, united. It’s ebullience’s seamless glimmers one peers at, squints, but can’t focus on, concepts so punctuated exuded above breeze and umbrage, above crude seeded sentences so strident and so unpiteously quiet all seems exceeded, muted in a sudden tidal squall, in a susurrus segues, queued, sequential as music in our cerebrum releases in a pulsed arched shot all repelling torment. It’s underlined passages, pieces of happiness that course a torso, erect bridges all around as out in squares, museums and neon marquees elan murmurs, a relearned reverse elegy. It’s letters and sentences’ bruises, existence sluiced, deluged, scattered across oceans and rivulets, curled old routes that tongue bones’ velvet coves.



2
But there’s outside, coldness, heat, violence folded over, pained, in a quandary quivers at the edges of cities and sequoia trees; outside declines every time because of missiles, arms trade, armadas, sellers of children, females, meioses, lab-coated men fondle our sequenced DNA, alleles, ovules, cells as mere merchandise. And it seems to me one must often be alive and roam in demi-time all heres and theres of desire, to move from there to once or next squeegeeing the universe’s dorsal plane. But there’s outside and it seems it’s all hard to live despite December’s luminous tropical breezes. Inside, there’s letters to let us invent, lace up, ravel spiraled cords, sleeves to suspend us from our palms and equipoise our bodies. Outside there’s outside and horizons, unusual unease, nervousness revives the body and piques its exile desires but there’s outside, a pursuit
Outside, June accruals
coax a rosy codex,
deuces seduce
a cued economy.
Audio arcades cajole
lacquered decimals, splice
recopied similes, lever lines
fold up medium
enfold milieux.
Solaced, a closed
clause a clue.
and prey, lures, leads, realms, identities unseen under linen or suede there’s cemeteries, burlesque lounges, security areas, lois spéciales. Outside if you touch a living side, an exquisite turning side of life easily cedes its pale coral series, cadenced roses, a luminous ivory moves across children’s voices and small arms’ laughter. But there’s outside and pain’s live side never appears. Next you fall asleep on public objects’ names quell life’s obscurity, eyes’ mist amasses bones at temples’ north as limes, quinces, seeds, sequins, names’ or a lexeme’s angles of arms, patellas, ulnas, clavicles, almonds, exceeded extend, unreel, roll out as replies or burst and convert dimmed jet names accelerate one’s pulse once more and more trembles, quavers, and beasts’ quivers. But outside, there’s a time of roving. Outside, a deft day rises.



3
It’s names of places, cities, eerie revenant climates. Of fictive people. Clear mornings, an unyielding delicate rain, unseen images from Iraq, Qatar, Odessa, L’Aquila or the Americas, deluges compel us to cluster close amid dense corpses, it’s quiet or violet gestures, mortars, ice cubes ringing in glasses on a sunned terrasse at five or a saucer’s ding in a deep blue basin, lessened stutters that jump and torment a moment, a slap, a tug, or embrace, cities’ names Venice, Reading, Langué, Quito, Pueblo, subjects Laure, Elena or Emma. Names filed to needles over eons and novels, uttered as one suspires, laughs, spits, squints, tongues an olive, verbs added to lips’ pleasures, successes, deliquescence, sure death. It’s calves or clavicles, temple, bone, ovum, lobe, and even more, venous names needed to quench us, conjure us, see us surrender to emptiness, to unroll us as cats at sunrise, ride our minds sunset to sunrise, taxi us extended and sleepless in sinuous cities asleep at midnight, leave solitude clamped an abscess in our teeth. See it’s sentences queued, quoted, uttered from memory in desire or pride, often muttered in love as one places a palm on a nape or decants a reddened liqueur. It’s nouns that urge us to pursue, project etymologies on a screen all sound so noise of enlivened unquiet cries or pleasure’s tender murmurs rove over reveries, quires and descend on our secret obscurities. It’s a noun’s redounded unsureness, unless lenses or lessens, rose emissions or isomer noises. It’s indexes’ lissome dissonance, nouns lemmatised, summons’ undecided seams, murmurs issued across a meson, a modem, a sine. See it’s runnel, slope, butte, coulee, dam, levee, allee, aleja, viale, avenue, street, scattered amidst quercetin and quercetum, baroque and ultraviolet, cinder moss and tree in dictionaries. See it’s names of Sounds, sea arms, sets of senses that motion, scrape or smudge softness on our breasts, cold, quivers, send ceaseless shivers up a spine as one seeks mordant quotes to rupture the future’s fluid time. It’s nouns that gulp fire and life, one can’t tell if they’re Latin, French, Urdu, Veda, Cree, Mandarin, Aleut, Creole, Basque, English, secrete a number, deed, quorum, animal or accelerate old anxieties eddying before us in doubled somber contours full of luster and immense legends.

translated from the French of Nicole Brossard