Give weight to her breasts
lift them up with both hands —
life in the fields
a bit rough
with the pissing cows —
Iseut is sick to her stomach
of being torn open '
belly to sell not for sale,
everyone's object of desire
lives under trees.
The moonlight again
so round, dispensing selves —
round, astonished eyes
see distant satellites —
funny how bloodless the real.
A cottage for two hearts —
mum or swearing,
they recoil from a unified tale —
the hermit in this remote place
is a foil of a good god good goddamn
good evening good teller of tales —
a pause in the Morrois forest,
can't stop pissing — he draws
his bow most tight, the arrow's for her.
Clavicle, sternum, breast of the man —
Iseut anal, oral, social, a sport,
pawed near the wells —
complains: get a move-on,
big savage — erogenous
zones planted with gorse —
read:
he marks his territory with piss,
she gets up on her hind legs.
Ear to the ground
strip bare whom you'll betray —
undress her ass
in the lyric tradition
screams sublimated
into scientific exhibits —
balls aching
for love of poetry.
Uniform pink
the tongue
deceives — glorious bodies
apart at the hip —
masterful brains
imagination
fueled
by the long fucks.
Kelenn, the holly that, in spite of its name, doesn't teach —
she puts her head on his lap,
closes her eyes against sleep —
would be a great fragrant void,
an amphibian.
from Triste Tristan
Paol Keineg
translated from the French by Rosmarie Waldrop
Listen to the poems read in the original French by Dorothée Fraleux:
Paol Keineg was born in Brittany in 1944. His first book, Le poème du pays qui a faim (1967) became a manifesto of Breton militancy. While remaining intensely interested in Celtic mythology, he taught for almost thirty years at Brown and Duke before returning to France in 2009. He is both playwright and poet. His most recent book is a Collected Poems: Les trucs sont démolis (2008). Burning Deck has published a translation of his Boudica.
Rosmarie Waldrop is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Driven to Abstraction, Curves to the Apple, and Blindsight (all three from New Directions), and Love, Like Pronouns (Omnidawn). Her Collected Essays, Dissonance (if you are interested), was published by University of Alabama Press in 2005. Two novels, The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter and A Form/of Taking/It All, are available in a single paperback (Northwestern UP, 2001). She has translated fourteen volumes of Edmond Jabès's work (her memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, is out from Wesleyan UP) as well as books by Emmanuel Hocquard, Jacques Roubaud, and, from the German, Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, Oskar Pastior, Gerhard Rühm, Ulf Stolterfoht. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she co-edits Burning Deck Books with Keith Waldrop.
