The Fire That Speaks Our Language

Yesterday, local poets. Today, something from poets faraway in recently-troubled France, from the collection called The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, ed. by J.D. McClatchy, Vintage Books, 1996:


EVERY MORNING
—Claire Malroux, France (b. 1935)

Every morning the curtain rises
Alone, you listen to the dark dissolving
The stars slowly clicking themselves apart
The sky turns back into this breezy scarf
Shaken out by the awakened birds
You don't touch each other but you walk together
Leaning against and within each other until evening
When, alone, you chase the wild night at your gate
Sweet to weep for, like a wet stray dog
You don't want to hear the crows cry
The diminishing number of lines
To be spoken on this stage, set for how long
The shadow grows, flesh hollows itself out, another
Takes your place. Step by step you leave yourself.


Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker

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MY BODY
—Jacques Dupin, France (b. 1927)

My body, you will not fill the ditch
That I am digging, that I deepen each night.

Like a wild boar caught in the underbrush
You leap, you struggle.

Does the vine on the rampart remember another body
Prostrate on the keyboard of the void?

Throw off your clothes, throw away your food,
Diviner of water, hunter of lowly light.

The sliding of the hill
Will overflow the false depth,
The secret excavation underfoot.

Calm wriggles into the night air
Through disjointed stones and the riddled heart

At the instant you disappear,
Like a splinter in the sea.


Translated from the French by Paul Auster

________________________

WAITING WITH LOWERED VOICE
—Jacques Dupin, France

Waiting with lowered voice
For something terrible and simple
—Like the harvest of the lightning
Or the crumbling of the plaster...

It is the nearness of the intact sky
That emaciates the flocks,
This jug ot burning rock,
And the revival of smells from the flowerless mountain...

Summits of wind and famine,
Insipid motet, fury of returns,
I dread the ruin which is due to me
Less than this immunity
That fetters me in its rays.

Promised land, land that crumbles,
Despite the columns, despite the drum.


Translated from the French by Paul Auster

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MINERAL KINGDOM
—Jacques Dupin, France

In this country lightning quickens stone.

On the peaks that dominate the gorges
Ruined towers rise up
Like nimble torches of the mind
That revive the nights of high wind
The instinct of death in the quarryman's blood.

Every granite vein
Will unravel in his eyes.

The fire that will never be cured of us
The fire that speaks our language.


Translated from the French by Paul Auster

_____________________

—Medusa

Medusa encourages poets of all ilk and ages to send their poetry and announcements of Northern California poetry events to kathykieth@hotmail.com for posting on this daily Snake blog. Rights remain with the poets. Previously-published poems are okay for Medusa’s Kitchen, as long as you own the rights. (Please cite publication.)