Delirium (17 page)

Seven-year-old Poets

(Les Poëtes de sept ans)

Dutifully shutting up the copy-book,

the mother, with a proud and imperious look,

ignored her child’s contemptuous disdain,

his blue eyes flashing, his face scored with spots.

All day he studied in a sweat, and crammed,

but through his effortless facility

dark fissures showed; a sour hypocrisy.

In corridors, their mildewed papers blotched

by damp, he
’d stick his tongue out, and fists jammed

into his groin, see lights behind his eyes

reveal a pattern. When a door opened

admitting lamplight, they could see him high

on the stairway, contained and out-of reach...

In summer, cowed, complacent like a fish

he’d meditate in the latrines and wish

he was a hermit on a coral beach.

In winter, he
’d lie up behind the house,

buried in clay, feet stretched against a wall

and watch a cold moon whiten the garden.

He
’d force his eyes until visions appeared,

and hear the creak of rotten trellises.

The friends he chose as his accomplices

were stringy, poor, pink-eyed and cretinous,

who hid yellow and black grubby fingers

coated with mud in threadbare, patched-up clothes.

They spoke with gaps, these prematurely old

village idiots, and if his mother caught

him out in these friendships, and if she knew

the depths of his concern, she said nothing.

Lies come easily if your eyes are blue.

At seven he began to write novels

about lives in the desert, liberty,

forests, suns, riverbanks, wastelands. His mind

was prompted by the magazines he
’d find

depicting Spanish and Italian girls

in poses that had his cheeks burn with fire.

And when, brown-eyed, short-skirted and frisky,

the little girl of eight who lived next door

would roughly jump on him without panties

and pin him in a corner, he would bite

her bottom, hold her face down to the floor

until she beat him black and blue, and he

could taste her skin. It lasted all the night.

He feared December Sundays, the ennui

of sitting with his hair greased back, reading

a Bible with its cabbage-green edges.

Nightly, dreams pushed him out on cliff-ledges;

he hated God, but loved the grimy men

he saw at evening return to suburbs,

where mad performing artists and vendors

were crowded round like monsters in a den.

He dreamt of prairies, the earth
’s rising scent

and golden puberties, love on a plain

rushed by the quick wind and laid flat again.

He relished the dark things in life, and sat

in his bare shuttered room, the ceiling blue,

inhaling its sodden humidity.

The novel that he read took up the theme

of heavy ochre skies, flooded forests,

flesh-petalled flowers open in astral woods.

– Then cataclysm, collapse, vertigo,

neighbourhood noises carried from the street.

He lay stretched out on a raw canvas bale,

hunched, tense, already breaking into sail.

Faun
’s Head

(Té
te de faune)

In foliage, a dense green flecked with gold,

tentative leaves on fire with gorgeous flowers,

in that green heart a vivid kiss smoulders,

exploding through the sumptuous tapestry.

A startled faun abruptly shows his eyes

and bites the scarlet flowers with white teeth.

Stained as the crimson sediment of wine,

his mouth opens in laughter on a leaf.

And when he breaks for cover like a squirrel,

his outcry still vibrates in every tree,

and you can see as a bullfinch triggers

the gold woodland crown close like a whirlpool.

Saarebr
ück

(L
’Eclatante Victoire de Saarebrück)

Loaded with blue and gold, a demigod,

the Emperor commands the middle ground,

his saddle posture’s stiff as a ramrod,

he hardly jolts when his horse paws a mound.

The conscripts group around a gilded tent

and a red cannon; they rise drowsily.

Pitou salutes the historic moment,

and greets the Emperor with ‘Victory!’

Dumanet leans on his rifle like a cane,

a peasant farmer taking stock of rain,

he shouts ‘The Emperor!’ to a stony ring

of faces, only wine would make them sing.

Boquillon, flat out in blue, shifts his butt,

and sneeringly quips ‘Emperor of what?’

The Lice Hunters

(Les Chercheuses de poux)

The child
’s head throbs; its red flush sparks with pain;

he dreams of faces behind streaming veils

before he sits up, his two big sisters

are by his bed, long fingers, silver nails.

They take the child to a dormer window;

a flower garden swims in the blue air.

The dew silvers, as they begin their search,

slow fingers probing his unruly hair.

Enticing, intimate, their breath vibrates,

its rose-scent has him shiver; now they miss,

and now they catch, he hears saliva drawn

lightly over red lips designed to kiss.

Their eyelashes beat like frenetic moths,

electric fingers set his blood on fire,

he lies submissively, his hair crackles;

beneath their sovereign nails the lice expire.

Entranced, and lazy as though dulled by wine,

or the harmonica
’s deluding wail

the child feels in their caresses the first

awakenings of a future lifting sail.

On the Road

(Ma bohè
me — Fantaisie)

I’d take to the road, my fists thrust inside

torn pockets, my threadbare coat grown ideal.

I walked under the sky, the Muse my bride.

I dreamt of making my brilliant loves real.

My trousers gaped from disrepair, my shirt

was buttonless; my pursuit was the line

I
’d strike into a lyric. The ground hurt.

I lay at night exposed to cold star-shine.

On autumn evenings sitting by a ditch

I listened to the stars and felt the dew

cold on my forehead burnt to fever-pitch

by a strong wine. I acted out my part

playing the lyre on laces threaded through

the busted boot I nursed beneath my heart.

At the Green Inn

(Au Cabaret-Vert)

For a whole week I ripped my boots to shreds,

scuffing the stones. I entered
Charleroi,

and at the Green Inn asked for buttered bread

and half-cooled ham. The waitress was a toy.

Happy, I stuck my legs out underneath

the green table and studied the artless

designs of the wallpaper, then the dress

of the big-breasted girl, no straps, a sheath

— a kiss wouldn
’t scare her vivacity —

she brought me my request, and smilingly

let her eyes dance upon the coloured plate,

pink and white ham spiked with clove of garlic,

and filled my beer-mug, I could hear it tick,

a sunbeam lit the froth’s heady gold spate.

Hunger

(
‘Faim’,
Une saison en enfer
)

If I have a taste

it
’s for the earth and stones.

I always feed on air,

rock, coal and iron.

My hungers circulate

elect fields of sound,

drain the bright poison

of convolvuli.

Eat the broken pebbles,

old church stone,

boulders left by floods,

bread sown in grey valleys.

              * * *

The wolf howled under the leaves,

spitting out bright feathers

of his feast of fowl:

like him I consume myself.

Lettuce, fruit

wait only to be picked;

but the hedge-spider

eats only violets.

Let me sleep! Let me simmer

on Solomon
’s altars.

The scum boils over the rust

and flows into the Cédron.

              Finally, o happiness, o reason, I removed from the sky the blue which is black, and I lived as a gold spark of cosmic light. From joy, I adopted the most absurd and exaggerated modes of expression:

              It is found again!

             
What? Infinity.

             
It is the sea

             
mixed with the sun.

My eternal soul,

live your dream

despite the lonely night

and the flaming day.

So you free yourself

from human suffering,

common aspirations!

You fly off free...

– Always without hope

and no
orietur
.

Science and patience,

torture is sure.

No more tomorrow

satin starfire,

your resolute heat

is duty.

It is found again!

What? Infinity.

It is the sea mixed

with the sun.