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Suspens |
from Suspens |
Ils éclosent à l’aube. Je les
refoule
A l’abri de ma paupière, essaim labile
Une forme presque aussitôt disparaît
Parmi d’autres noires et rayées
Dans un puits au pied d’un immeuble
Une jette par la fenêtre un seau
Et des larmes roulent sur la chaussée
Une est penchée gravement vers la voix
Inaudible d’un gramophone à manivelle
Une autre relève un voile de cheveux
Et façonne comme un nid sur sa nuque
Avant d’entamer le rituel du jour
Déesse de la vie, vestale bien-aimée!
Sous les flèches du soleil je la
Fixe, la cloue au centre de ma soif
Emigrée d’une histoire sans paroles
Elle va peut-être ouvrir enfin la bouche
Me conter son voyage à vingt mille lieues
Sous ma mémoire, au pire
Me donner rendez-vous à un prochain épisode
Elle secoue la tête. Il y a dans la mienne
Trop de nuages, de neige, d’ornières,
de vent |
They hatch at dawn. I push them
back
Into my eyelid’s shelter, mutable swarm
One shape almost instantly disappears
Among others, black ones and striped ones,
In a well near a building’s foundation
One empties a bucket out the window
And tears roll out onto the road
One is gravely bent toward the inaudible
Voice of a hand-cranked phonograph
Another lifts her veil of hair
And twists it in a bird’s nest at her nape
Before beginning the day’s ritual
Goddess of life, beloved vestal!
Beneath the arrows of the sun, I
Fix her, nail her to the center of my thirst
Emigrant of a wordless history
Who will, perhaps, open her mouth at last
To tell me of her voyage, twenty thousand leagues
Under my memory; at least
Make an appointment for the next installment
She shakes her head. There are, in mine,
Too many clouds, snowbanks, routines, winds
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from
Paragraphs from a Daybook
for Claire Malroux |
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On a beechwood sideboard, there
sat in state
an object whose functional equivalent
would be, in American, a trivet,
but “trivet” originally meant
something three-legged—no, that isn’t
it.
A recollection that I can’t translate:
carved wood, a blue ceramic square,
chimes which a child with short brown hair
released into the air, turning a key,
on a noon-shuttered kitchen’s red-tiled
floor.
The still heat of the estival Midi
exhaled, leonine, beyond the door
as the child, bare-legged and barefoot,
made up verses for
the tune she’d conjured out of the hot plate—
—if that’s the word for it.
A gray June afternoon outside Auxerre,
the last few tables of a flea market:
on one of them, boxlike, carved wood, a square
tile, with fin de siècle bathers, set
in it, a key between its four squat feet
which I turn. “Für Elise”
chimes in the dusty marketplace.
And somehow I participate
in a midsummer memory
of a cool moment, a still neutral date.
The thin child, a large scab on her right knee,
stands in the shuttered midday darkness, while
I hold what’s entered my own history:
music; carved wood, a blue ceramic tile.
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Bodyscapes
/ Su¶erPose
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La ligne m'ouvre la tête
un a r b re se d é p l i e
the city pushes in me .
B o d y : là où la ville s'éploie
— layers —
les g é n é r a t i o n s
s e d é l i e n t
:
desire as the street
growing through
my mind
swapping up-side down the new
in me .
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