Translated from the French by Patrick Williamson
These poems originally appeared in French in Eloge de l’Imperfection (ed. Al Manar, Paris, 2012) and have been translated with the permission of the publisher.
1.
Sometimes at the threshold of presence,
the world seems nor more than
the rumor of a dream,
an obscure family of bodies,
the tearing of the obvious.
here and there sleep folk
scattered under worn-out suns
dressed in old truths
walking to start over
the imperfect desire to live.
2.
Who’s really there
when you move from one thing
to the other
from one riddle to another,
who speaks
or doesn’t speak
in the incompletion
of breath?
At what point
does the self progress,
where do you feel
one with yourself?
Which book do you read
the secret of life in?
3.
It’s all too much:
faces, objects, looks,
words, movements, noises,
numbers, letters, bodies
and beasts, submissions
and allegiances, references
and preferences, genders, and deities…
Look for a place
where the mourning of memories
is the only reason
to live,
in an intimate geography
of silence.
Look for a tangible Qur’an
in the clay of all desire
without cruelty
neither that of men
nor that of the gods
the visible alone
will there reveal its secrets
or its evidence.
4.
Every day
we think we see things,
are we not truly blind
because we cannot see
what we see
we guess
what is given
in the clarity of habits
in the memorial mimicry
of what is already distant.
5.
Love is sometimes hostile to us
barely grazing
our imagination,
it barely glances at itself.
But late in life
in the weak wind of the body
we bury it
in its own sky.
Also Read:
Laure Cambau’s poems, translated by Patrick Williamson
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