CRUSHED

With all the required violence
I am about to clash
With my destiny.

It's now been scores of years
I've been sitting here, waiting.
Today
I've chanced my attitude
And with all the required
Violence
I am about to clash with my destiny.

I shall imitate the strident cry
Of dolphins, and let myself be  rolled, like them,
On shores born of my hallucinations.

Destiny could take on 
The traditional form of the Bull.
If so, I shall slit open its belly
Before all the bemused spectators
Drunk with spilled blood.

I myself am the arena
And the beast being butchered
And the blade in the wound
And the indefatigable fighter
Are also all myself.

When destiny reveals itself to me
I shall knock it to the ground
And recapture all that I lost to it
Thinking of my days to come.

    Paris, 2002
 
 

ENIGMA

It may be that the enigma
Never unveils itself
To the questioning
Or supplicating gaze.

It may be that the door demolished
Gives onto nothing but a charnel-house
Of perished ideas and a few images
Devoid of any significance.

It may be that the enigma is no enigma.

It may be that he alone who
Passes from ignorance to ignorance,
He alone possesses the key to it.

Through sibylline ignorance
Through luminous ignorance
The disconsolate heart recovers strength.
 

The above two poems were translated from the French by James Kirkup and republished from Banipal No 17
 
 

THE POPLAR

The populus tree rose up there in all its fullness.
With my liking of assonance, I saw in it an infinity of peoples, 
Populations of the lost come to slake their thirst at the brink of my fatigue.
I came and laid me down beneath its shade.

It made me happy to think that the mere sight of me
Brought it respite from wandering so long among branches and roots.

For me, it had dropped anchor, the tree-voyager.
For me, it had surrendered its arms, the tree-warrior. 
And there I lay
A man unimpaled by any martyrdom,
Saved by the beauty of suicide's attraction
Transformed into a vast appetite for all that dwells within reach, 
But that forever refuses to be possessed.
 
 

MY FATHER'S HOUSE

Vast and without bolts was the house of my father. Relatives from the country would come and rest there as they passed through the town. Each one had his rifle slung from the shoulder.  I asked one of them if he had already killed with it.  "Yes", he told me, "a whole lot of partridges, which I usually bring down with the first shot."

Another told me that each of us bears his own death within him.  He repeats it to himself, like a refrain.  A song from the good old days.  Then that was all.

Hearing him talk like that, my aunt, who was superstitious, retorted: "Why do you speak of death? We do not die, we emigrate."

They were people of the vastnesses, with a simplicity of soul.  Each had his rifle slung from the shoulder.  And in their minds there jostled memories of partridges brought down with the first shot, of wild boars dropped dead in their tracks, of fogs you could cut with a knife deep in the depths of the forests, of a common felicity in having good thoughts about death.
 
 

NAMES

Telling me that her name was O, she hastened to add: "Like the character in that novel.  Have You read it?" I had read it, and I got the feeling it was a bad sign.  After a few days, common felicity - body and spirit, of course - the tree of our friendship began to shed its leaves. One never puts oneself without impunity under the thumb of another's name.  A sheikh in our village used to pray: "My God, grant that I live in harmony with my name, the one that refers to Thee, the undeserved gift they entrusted me with."  Others, who bore discordant names attempted to flee them like the plague and to rid themselves of them like the burdens of a bad dream.
 
 

STRIKE

This woman friend called a talking strike.  She forced herself to say only the strictly necessary each time she felt her brain giving way and reverting to those obscure forces from an inadequately tranquillised and perhaps permanently sick past.  Her whole effort became second nature and contented habit consisted in stopping inside her head that endless unscrolling of images, those avalanches of peevish, vengeful reminiscences.  I always admire the light-heartedness with which, once all that has passed over, she pursues her postponed reading, her dance classes, and what she calls her spaced-out loves.  And the interminable romance in which she narrates the exploits of a father she formerly detested, rehabilitated now as a leading figure of the Resistance.
 

The above four poems were translated from the French by James Kirkup and republished from Banipal No 12