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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