Six Poems

They spoke to us of the South like some forbidden place.

They told us:

“What was once matter or body is now dogma.

And conspires against
us”
 
I ask myself what sensation will invade me when I finally return without remains.

Whether there will be ashes that remember

flesh capable of understanding
the height of this
encounter
 



Here I am. The rest of the world lies before me.

The wind from the north sutures your words to this house.
Lodges our fear at the root. 
Lends a name to that which we believe we have loved for a long time.

Think of the moment we knew this wall would fall down.
Open the door, let the dogs come in: let them eat at the table.

So that the earth smells of carnival and barricades for once.
So that it smells of something that constantly dissolves and reforms.

Don’t stare into the beauty of the flames.
 
Split open a crevice.

Break the circle.

Escape
 




You are the same age as your skin,
but memory is too old to understand that.

I will repeat your name when you are another
to evoke
that which I lost and loved deeply.

Language endures.
 
Bodies do not
 



Autobiography #1
First pleasure

I’ve heard it said that desire is an image from childhood.

If so, you will find my desire by a river
in a waterlogged terrain
where two boys roll around in the grass.
 
I remember the humidity of the place.
The smell of resin that emanated from the alder trees.
The green light that fell on the meadow in the afternoon. 
 
Bathed in this light
the boy’s body pressed to the ground
mine on top of his tumbling from one side
hitting the stones with my knees.

If desire is truly an image from childhood
then you will find my desire in the wound.
 
How to flee from the place
where pleasure becomes stagnant and ferments,
ferments.

How memory empties
to finally become
a new man.
 
 

Everything
Georges de la Tour
 
For a moment I dreamt that this verse could fit
the distance that separates my body from the candle.
My finger in the wax and the warmth
opening a passage between skin and flame.
For a moment I dreamt that this verse could fit
my heart, the blood thrown into the blaze by the veins
like streams flow in April floods,
sap that trickles through the oak trunks.
These things and their rhythm were in my dream at the same time
but even more so was the distance
between myself and the world,
my tongue on the verge of igniting itself on my palate,
the fragment of air that drives me from the rose.
Who misses the feel of a flower
when you can touch the texture of a dream?
Flowers and their flowering fit into my dream,
the movement of the ivy as it climbs the ash
freely, in a riverine forest, for instance.
And there was no limit for star or light
because shadows shone as materials shone,
globe and sky and cloud in a perfect arc.
How will I awaken in a place
where skin is the border between my body and the wind?
In my dream it had been crossed.
The air penetrated me like a knife blade would the flesh of a deer.
Or wax as it burns a thumb.
A heart, a membrane.
The inflamed mouth that edges closer to the light.
The ivy ceaselessly climbing the ash.
I will never be able to say everything.
 



The Wild Life

For some reason, I had known that the words
would end up erasing the experience
when the poem made its arrival.
 
But I
found the way back
to this encounter:

I purge myself of the sin.
My feet tread on the earth,
they welcome how it feels as though they were touching the world
and all that is wild arranges itself
while memory vanishes into the texture.

The stranger says:

–There is a latch between a life
and the life of all others
that slides open when they meet.
You can’t borrow words to write of it.
When experience presses on us, its meaning withers.
 
Back then I had to choose
between words and life.
 
I chose life.
 
I asked the world to show me
its wild face.