Poèmes extraits de la pièce
E
The piazza is only a skin
of light, a notion of loss
contained in him as he kneels
against her kindness. There is
stone and sky— the terrible stumbles
of memory. I want to understand
the hand unfolding, the tip and thrust
of wings, the grain as bait for
the savageries of flight. I am confused by
the bright life of him. I look for signs
and find none save the posture of joy,
the possibility of joy in his brief exhale.
S
Sand is a good place to start, sand and heat
though he left them long ago for the
cold pavement of his escape.
A sky— the blue drag of summer and
bored he might pull his sister’s braid,
chase a grasshopper on to the blistered tarmac.
He believes himself big, bigger than the sea
sweating off the eternal dream of afternoon.
His mind has no knowledge of la tour Eiffel,
Rue Belgrand, the circumference of
his lover’s yawn. Only the water flat
conquerable stretching away from his
omnipotent gaze.
They sat side by side, these 2 small poems.
They could not look at each other— I had not yet
given them eyes. They were sand and piazza
surrounded by vast white empty. If I had known them
then, if I had heard the scrape of their days.
If I had climbed the Eiffel tower with them,
looked to far borders, sung songs for their
lost toy boats. For them I wish beautiful mothers
behind cameras, and joy. And what would they
do with joy? Well they would imagine hands
and play guitars into the ground,
they would become rock stars.
But they didn’t become rock stars.
They didn’t measure the circumference
of dawn. They struggled to share the
empty space of a page. Stumbling into
the silence of language, their knees
with no mother’s to kiss. What does it
mean to be reduced to a poem?
Does the sand, does the sunshine
stain anything other than this brief fit of words?