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The song of the castawaysPoem extracted from « Dans l'interstice » (« Through the chinks… » by Jean-Michel MAULPOIX, & Fata Morgana, publ., 1991 Translated from the original French by Catherine Wieder
We are the wrecked castaways of language To and fro do we wander from one country to another, clinging on to the floated woods of our phrases Such are the remains of an old vessel crashed so long ago But desire still plots whilst we ship adrift And sculpt in those planks statuettes of sirens with blue hair And go on singing with those very same lungs Let us repeat the sea Do not bring any stupid trial to the blue
The sea, clinging on to the sea Shivers and slides on the sea Its movements of a skirt, its blows of the shoulders, its redundancies And all this blue coming to us on the wide flats of the sea We like the way the small craft passes and goes Swaying from one wave to another, dancing its fluttering turmoil to meet the sea again And its weird jingling sound When music unfolds itself on the huge score of the sea
The sea mingles with the sea Mixes its lakes and puddles Its ideas of gulls and foams Its dreams of seaweeds and cormorants With its heavy blue chrysanthemums from the open sea With clumps of forget-me-nots on the white walls of the islands With the bruises of the horizon With switched off light-houses With the dreams of the unfathomable sky
The sea is a fallen blue sky Long ago did the sky indeed lose its keys in the sea Under which suns should we from now on lose ourselves ? On which shoulder will we rest the fever of our wet head ? Our dreams are birds' feet on the sand Fragments of nails cut a few inches away from the sea We burn on the beach huge heaps of corpses Since such are the words with their bones and smokes
Heaps of thighbones and metacarpusses A pyre of sweet-smelling blades of grass and crackling powders A dry meadow would be kindled next to the sea High flames headlong jumping among the brooms And all of a sudden a woman's chest erected in the spluttering Offered to that mad love Throwing towards heaven the long moan Of he who scorched his heart
Alone, does he walk towards her, on the narrow granite jetty Embarking his perishable body towards nothing She remains the huge lying shape, running towards him Throwing towards him her flurries and petticoats
Lo ! here does he stand, He the small man, standing up straight on the dyke with his pencil Tightly pressed against her, but apart Both so close and yet losing sight of each other Pressing on to each other, their hearts badly anchored
The blue bathes a little that small body of a man The blue catches him in its nets A speck of flesh or chip of bashful love A tuft of light between his palms Stained with deep ink Lips tightly closed by the wave Muted, having nothing to reply to the open blue Voiceless in the water's maze
Why can't we put out our roots in the sea As drowned men and weeds do ? We would easily carry on our shoulders The never fading blue sky Which however dreams of colours and hues And the lukewarm wool of the foams And the poisonous fruits of the open sea In which no human lip did ever bite Thus would we return to the infinite garden
We won't fill the sea with our tears We'd rather support with our songs the efforts of the storms Throwing their cries and leaches on to our heads And when our watery eyes no longer see anything We'll know better still what the sea is The scales covering our hearts will have fallen And our nacreous skin will at last be so white That we would no longer fear the mad love of the sirens
Cheers to the skies of the open sea So will we drink from chalices and ciboriums Gluttunously will we drink the sea No water will ever quench our thirst We are thirsty of the salt Our lips are greedy In the blue sea, it's always Sunday When gold fishes kneel
Since the days when the floodtide started carrying us We started a liking for eternity Water has gotten into our head And crystal droplets in our blood We hardly remember our fellow creatures Whose gardens fade And whose children grow Our heart is so blue.
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