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prunings |
by Jean-Michel MAULPOIX
Translated from the original French by Catherine Wieder
Furniture in you comes apart and crackles.
Memories are death vertebras. Sometimes your head goes back into your own corpse, you close your eyes : the edge of memory opens its coffin full of fruits.
What worth could this life still be to him from whom the illusory sparkle of love, that taste of bitter-sweet happiness, greediness and newness' love at first sight were withdrawn too soon ?
All the words are held in bundles in our throats, we're waiting ! dying tenderly paves its way.
We watch for the hatching of our bones under the flesh. Soon night will be of clay. We'll leave. Our luggage ? A closed fist on an impossible tit.
Between us, trains stop, crashing their landscapes. Slow rowers lose their memory between our fingers.
Sometimes, in edgeways, light birds are allowed to become words. On the sand, a grey brook of salt, the pink-blue brains of love, a lip-stick of kisses, just for fun.
The sea leaves the church with a ring of foam on its finger. Waves caper. The beach smokes a big cigar of Virginia sand. No one knows why the weather is so beautiful, nor what the sea dreams up.
A shell whispers to one's ears that it is wrong that men should die.
It was like a faraway iodized fragrance. White are our calves in the ocean at the beginning of the holidays. You were wearing a sailor's bonnet. Your little dog was biting at the waves. I was throwing pebbles into the open sea. I let my mind wander ...
Today's memories of ours skim and bounce.
Evenings blabbermouth. Night falls, damp with rumours. Gusts of wind blow out the trees. The sky opens its bird's heart. It draws to a twinkling close. Then I undertake to write a little stronger about what keeps silent. My blood's slower and the dying is less acrid in my throat.
Respite, impatience lulls, such is the fate of any brisk desire. One's only a little worried with the horizon fraying. One single hour without stamina felt the evening pulse on the wrist : one will die one step at a time.
We walk close next to each other on mouldings of dead leaves. The meticulous night sets down a wintry of white pages onto the ground. On the brow of the hill, I kiss you in a large cloud of mist.
Lo ! winter comes. Memory snows. The soul freezes. Dumb laughs. A life void of scoring. The corpse yawns within the body. My memories caress your blind eyes.
Night wearing a helmet of dreams squeezes the moist head and the sleeper's olive lids. Dimness spills its oil, an ebony smear over the hid and the wound. Ink clots the insoluble night it its fat.
I rose early in order to watch the window whiten. The day rises, sprayed with ghosts. Dawn trenches overflow with phalanxes and skulls. Death watches out for our beginnings. Living will come only later.
Rain starts falling around 4. The waters of night have broken. The whisper of veins is heard tapping on the window-pane. Torrents of laughs are also heard on the roof. Up there one imagines a few coffins bound on the morning's shoulder.
Night falls on tracks of rain. Ink turns blue, becoming milky between beginning and end. A little curds dream whitens the lips of the sleeper : Unhappy to his heart's content, he floats over the birth of dawn.
When night breaks, wind summons dawn loud and clear. It urges darkness to confess the day : a thousand of transparencies spurt against the panes, the house drinks from all its mouths. Gusts go into its head, it looks west : a new soul gleams on the other side of the horizon.
Many a soul are still asleep. Under their foreheads they house forests, ponds, and stones …
Just after the shower, the sky asks blue questions.
- Wherefrom would you like to die ?
- Through what I love.
