Me, I Talked
I.
The doors are closing; they fitted one into the other. A shadow tells a lie: in this grimace I foresee the movement which makes bodies turn white and which incessantly makes itself behind me, what I believe to be me, what ought to be me…
In front of that, and that could have been me, two eyes nibbling at the same black bone light up.
In front of that, a ghost always searching for the same knowledge.
My shadow was close by.
And I’ll never know where I’ve dragged my shadow, because some black part of it remains inside.
Me, I talked and I talked…
And that was my ghost and that was all that I was; and thus I was wandering from the earth’s head to its transparent feet. Sometimes older, sometimes nobody, sometimes making believe, as if ghosts had been enough to write the earth. If I screamed: “At rest!” things howled, but time imposed, imposed upon me a shadow with a belly that kept opening more and more while night acted as if she could see inside of it.
Later, much later, the seas with their vague gestures, the mothers of the Beyond, counted me among their fish.
II.
To the forest I explain myself.
After the ruins — all that’s vital; what is — I went towards the room’s night, the night’s room, toward what should be room and is but night, and not even night, because room with the sad sad sad night… So much so that the birds are between the sheets, dead because of a long time, and not even dead but cold and not even cold, but like dead and shared by time, with time, with what tends, what I hear, what I wait for…
To the forest I explain myself.
Between two weighty eyes — quite far from everything — Quite far is all that, quite far all that is — The snow thickened with the tolling of heavy moons, and its power is red at the lips cracked by black teeth.
Hardly was I anchored in the sea — the condition of shipwrecks — that the sea swelled with a last gulp of poison.
Me, I mysterize myself, I mysterize myself…
Explaining myself to the forest, to the intaglioed trees, to the empty birds, howling with the skin of the wolf whose teeth I dream…
Oh the great thicknesses!
Oh the great discoveries!
My heart a little the heart
Of the being called Loss.
I swim in my shadow,
Too much black inside.
My shadow is the tomb
Open to the wind.
Glowing with a single scream
Blackening up front
Spared in the bed
By who passes through,
I feed on my shadow.
Oh the great thicknesses!
Oh the great discolors!
My flower somewhat a fear
Of losing myself fields.
But who furrows me?
Let the world hang me
If death lays me out
Suite of empty eyes
Let it do me a long time.
-Jean-Pierre Duprey, from 4X1: Works by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey, and Habib Tengour
Poem of the Month 