Excerpt from (nevertheless enjoyment, by Elizabeth Bryant

(nevertheless enjoyment

and its suggestion)

Recesses of the grove where the core is primed to receive them. Warblers, flycatchers and finches in migration.

A streamlined body and lightweight skeleton minimize resistance.

when days pass)

You come across to me in pieces as ever. In the gaps are songs of waking frogs and sudden snaps as wood acclimates. I receive and receive but never capture. Fragments accumulate the same as many thousands thick monarch butterflies arriving. Not a blanket, only appearing to be one at an uninformed glance.

in what, as in what it is to say)

When a repeated phrase seems without thought, and no longer meant. That its employment is effortless in the worst sense.

and desire)

Another word for that. Find one. To find one. To find it first then compare. The problem with being alone. The problem of being faced with your own other word for it. The problem of being faced with your own other word for a lack of it. Some girls want what other girls want. Some girls want what boys want. If you’re alone what is your word for it? If you’re alone is your word for it still a word? When you have a word for it is it the word? Is it the word someone else has? Some girls have a word. Some girls have the same word boys have. Some words make the same word as the word for it, some want to. As if it could want to. As if a word could.

in an archive)

A collection of all you are capable of saying.

in an envelope)

His is bubble shaped but not round. She sees this or he thinks it. Imperfect origin. She thinks she sees this, so that he knows she does, or worries about it. Not quite round, or even strenuously irregular.

or an explanation)

Taken in a stream, particles and objects deposited all along, all along, may be rubricized. He recalls each one, then displays a helpless amnesia, so it might as well be forgotten. But before the privacy of sleep and while soaping his boy parts in the shower (after work, in the morning), he knows. Shoves it from the nest, but imperfectly.

and deposits)

However infrequent, accumulate nonetheless. An assemblage of sprockets joists carabiners and kick-wax molds a serviceable likeness. It’s possible to proceed this way, indefinitely informed by parted-out miscreations.

around a Chinese apple)

Eaten. Not as an apple, as I have come to understand apple.  But as a poem is realized.  Not as appearance, but evidence. Scholarship, in the sense that I know a female rose-breasted grosbeak—her bill, pale and larger than average for the size of her body; a question of proportions—when I see one, and this by way of kitchen windows, and time given to few visitors. The drab-colored female being more of a challenge.

in the morning, and the sweat broke around 3:30)

Now become one of those who slip away without saying. Find a sock and an earring. In the dim light, the red shadowed brown bare light of pre-dawn. Through the parts already there. There are a few things already there. Over there. A laundry pile. Over there a book. Open, face down. Now become one of those. Find boots and a sweater. Who slip them on without waking. You sleeping. Slip them on in the dim, in the color of a flower part. A sepal. Red sepal. Papers and photos. Find my things and put them on. Find things. The unfamiliar scrawl of a handwritten note.  The wherewithal to slip away in a dim light.

in the worst sense)

Bone is not the hollow super-structure of bird skeleton, mechanized for flight. Filled with derivatives strengthened on impact and use, it will get you like the word. With sudden breaks and apprehension.

at the drop-leaf kitchen table, visited by disproportionate cogencies)

The experience of bone. Its bogus claims of interiority and support.