Liquids of you
within
I saw what you
did not see
do you know all this
time for re-digging
the ditches
I am writing you demanding
anew
a river.
I am writing you we
are writing
are not including the thing
said
you were not you are
there
to see you
must I open
your shadow
in you to be
each alphabet
to provide
the light
to fall again
lower
must I sketch
your fugue?
Give yourself but
one sound toward
our dying
on your silences light
every lamp
reach that which
of you remains
at the edge of the book
for you were writing
there where no longer
is the division
in the rawness
of the magnolia
what had I
burned so that
you may appear?
One says
once more
again
in the guise of God
invested with
treason of the desire
to sink
once more again
into our boxes
of void
once more again
so as to drown
one’s lung
to scorch the center
of the sign
to be in one’s whole
halo
to hold the call
at the point of
the thorn.
Toward
the decline of
History the
blades the bars
head-on
spurts of
saltpeter
them lifted
in the dumbness
and the day
were they not wicks
of words
traces
of the lapidated
star?
You had sojourned
still in the
grids waiting for you
one who paints you
pitches the
crime
in the center of the
wheel
brutalizes the
mouths
invents another
caress.
Over you the bone
the sky
accessory of the
light
the yellow of the
jew
why does God
bury the
lamentations
and desert
the fists?
Something
of you cries out
echoed
the strike
came with
the reading
of dead ends
made the order
of the mad.
Stones obscure
glimmers not one
to warn
cables had
striated the earth
at the place of
the skin
was the poem
ripped open
wanted wanted
to follow
the nerve and
the evidence
to the corners
of the mouth
trickle of blood
I wanted to cover you
with vowels.
There too
you told me
time stops if
you do not speak
deserts my voice
the color
pales
Empires.
Put the lapis
deep in the corridors
come to the end
of sleep
unseal
the tropes go
to the outer
lose yourself to your
self and
breathe me
sister in death
we would sleep
beneath our eyelids
would give ourselves
to the moment.
Were you
ore
cut
bead of metal?
Bound by mouths
occupied by shadow?
Had I wanted
to heavy you
with words?
What would rise
from the world and the
stonings?
To see you I
had to open
the earth
from below.
from The Third
Esther Tellermann
translated from the French by Tim DeMay
Listen to "[I am writing you . . .]" read in the original French by the poet:
Though the book is called Le Troisième (The Third), the poems are written in the space between a personal journal and a letter, the self and the other. The private intimacy of Tellermann’s short, sparse, and heavily enjambed lyrics becomes public in the act of reading, an intimacy that is an object itself, disconnected from the contexts that are its sources yet gesturing toward them. Perhaps you, the reader, are the Third, overhearing but in overhearing also relating to the writer and the “you.” Tellermann’s work is thus a study in address, in building a world and even a social order out of private, Delphic moments that shine into meaning and shade into obscurity. This blinking between sense and feeling, between light and darkness, occurs not only within the collage of images and objects—“the rawness of the magnolia”; “the bone/the sky/accessory of the/light”—but also through the linked, architectural grammar. Foregrounded in the French, this grammar asks for a voice to wake the poem: it becomes alive in the transit between your mouth and your ear.
Esther Tellermann is a poet and practicing psychoanalyst who lives in Paris. Since the publication in 1986 of her first book of poetry, Première apparition avec épaisseur (reedited in 2007), the majority of Esther Tellermann’s work has appeared under Flammarion, including Guerre extrême (1999), Terre exacte (2007), Contre l’épisode (2011), and Sous votre nom (2015). A section of Guerre extrême was translated and published by Keith Waldrop as Mental Ground (Burning Deck, 2002). Recent works include Le Troisième in 2013 and Eternité à coudre in 2016, both with Éditions Unes. Esther Tellermann has also published a prose work, Une odeur humaine (2004, Farrago/Léo Scheer), and an essay Nous ne sommes jamais assez poètes (2014, La Lettre volée).
Tim DeMay is a Ph.D. student in English literature at the University of Chicago, where he researches experimental art and resistance. His French and Arabic translations have appeared in Banipal, Gulf Coast, ArabLit Quarterly, and Asymptote.
