Sibilance dissembling, the siege slews sluggish but sly, a Trojan Horse without the spectacle. And, before long, we, slapdash and staggering, survey what’s supervened: a slipup on our parts, that’s for certain. That’s curtains. Summer’s faded, sun dispirited away and sky sable. But of course there’s still tension — struggle, even — in the surrender.
Seduction is a kind of spillage, but that doesn’t mean there has to be spoilage. A swan alights thought not without a stumble because that incipient weightlessness sinks into the ballast of the beats. Consonance is a crutch only when it isn’t so tasteless as this, so garish as to dismiss simple accident, happenstance of a sort so nauseating it can’t but stand to persist, simmering and simpering in the sequential swirls of its hisses. Sometimes its excess lends itself to dissassembly.
I have trouble approaching Fading Summer by any inroads without slippage or detour. It offers precious little to grasp. A fading is no object: in its sluggish transit, it slips from seizure by the transitive. Its glister and speckle solicit the tenderness and humility of a yielding adherence, the suggestion of propulsion in its motile spacing only an ersatz stopgap for a substance to claim or cudgel.
This is not a program: are there words for the sieve whose clemency captures no such essence? The sieve that concedes to siege, the sieve that studies without scrutiny that “apparent, unsubstantial, evanescent, absolutely nondescript” spasm, where to study “is necessar[ily] to remain in some kind of on-going fugitive relationship to the place that both claims and prevents that practice.” The sieve that renders its own naming suspect.
A sieve can be a siege if it cedes enough.
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