Helena in the Sheep’s Pasture

Associate Editor Andy Sia: In DULSE’s collaborative piece, resonances and dissonances abound. Like a luxuriant field, sentences spill in unruly directions and heap into a tangle of senses, dissolving boundaries. Amid dislocation, there is guile: a porcupine in the ferns, a beautiful lampshade worn amid the pasture. 

Listen to DULSE read the piece:

Helena in the Sheep’s Pasture

I 

What can be decanted cannot be also construed. We taste upon the air the brine of the close touch, the needle to the heart. Logical discourse becomes useless, but hallucinogenic monologues retain mysterious elements, frank and candid metals. Let the mystery go by, we’ll wave and wink at it. To steal, slip away, to be aloof marks either independence or control through elisions. The order of escaping is (the ramblers)(wearing thistles). A porcupine in the ferns. A feather in the hand of a primate, stolen from an avian breast. Esquivanca, would you just admit you drank all the cordial! Of the slight discordance and of the almost . . . can you bear it? Milkweed disgorges silk. The (dis)encounter is (dis)ingenuous (to say the least). Casual discordance has broken many a quilting bee. Serious metaphors, which make of life a production of webs constantly weaving between the two, a beautiful hammock, a tussock, a tussling hillock, a loom of lost threads rewoven, a darning really. The order of the specular ogles. And goggles. They wear compound lenses. In speculative fashion one sheep’s bouffant is another goat’s braids. On the side of touching, tasting is every puppy. The oblique life is unexamined—rather, looked askance at. A fault a pickle, a temporary ripple. An aside, a slanting sloping in a bias cut is a close-fitting dress. Also marginalia written in cursive. This is not the space of a prevention, it is a conference of convention. No, it is an agglomeration of invention. Oh Helena, if you could only say it in one (no one wants you to 

II 

By the fireside I wait for rain, that barometric dousing. Instantly instantaneous are the steadfast. 

The I in the me went off somewhere among the consonants, the consonance, the continents. Oh discontinent, the ballad of my discontent. Will not (justly) be disquiet. The fatter side of the lean side is, generally speaking, normative. Madrigalia, marginalia when sung, make recitatives seem like ditherers. The comma splice (or fault) is a critical stitch. The basement books a ticket to the cellar convention. Thistles wait to be carried away, piercing . . .  

As I look on from the far side of the barrier, I see the sheep woolgathering and pondering their existence. Having no desire to decant or to recant, I’m going to sit here thirsty for a while. 

Helena on the fainting couch is getting to be a bit much. Admittedly, she looks very beautiful, but that might not be my opinion so much as the pickle brine of patriarchy speaking. 

The most beautiful lampshade I ever saw was being worn by Helena in the sheep’s pasture. 

Those cunning little beads, those nasty eyelets. How they nestle and close clasps. 

Blessed be the sheep who trespass for they shall be.