ORIGINAL TITLES
L’intervalle prolongé
Hors champ
Les retouches de l’intime
Les corridors du temps
Un visage appuyé contre le monde
GENRE
Poetry
YEAR
1995
TRANSLATOR
Andrea Moorhead
EDITOR
Guernica editions
EXTRACT
PROLONGED INTERVAL
1983
fissure takes the place
of expression
I explore
this emptiness
sweats
on the waters
this blue of memories
light traces the assault
wind the grasses
cross the inner walls
alone
the ground
persists
this earth: motionless presence
and I resist
the whiteness
OUT OF FOCUS
1985
At that time I had only eyes
absent from myself my body
locked from the inside
outside my paths narrowed
until they no longer were
I traced the erratic
movement of flesh
bound to dark as to silence
I walked at the edge of myself
conjugating exile and flight
from what remained
in the muscles
a fragment of a gesture
knowing well the grasp
of a shadow
not belonging to me
all that is my life you know
this cold that intervenes
to endlessly inscribe the end
INTIMATE ALTERATIONS
1987
In the decor of the room, you resemble a shadow that becomes that it touches. I see your
body and the space it displaces. To elude your glance, I would have to slide into this sea
the horizon draws. But incessantly I return to your face, your shoulders, your arms.
*
Outside the road is black. I wait for something to appear, for you to come along the
berme of this road. It is twenty-two hours and the blackness hasn’t diminished at all. I see
my face reflected in the window; everything is half empty.
*
What was I trying to tell you in the texture of the writing? And you, what are you looking
for in the contrasting image of reality? You will place alongside my body a body other
than yours. You will tell me to withdraw, then approach again. I will walk on the paths
you put down as a way of filling up the distance between life and myself.
*
Like a bottomless form, I walk without really advancing towards a place that would
gather both your face and mine. I speak to you, silencing the distance that holds me. I
think about what’s beginning again, under other forms.
TIME’S CORRIDORS
1988
The question without terror does not matter.
*
The landscape that has been shaken is the one that renews us. I love the wave that
breathes to the sand the force of abandonment and exhausts itself alone.
*
Does one know dust, foam, seaweed and rock? I am waiting for what will lead me all the
way to my night.
*
Perhaps am I a tremor of the earth, trying to disappear. Perhaps am I only that: a tremor
of being in the middle of an eclipse.
*
One marvels at so many lives
to seize hold of things
towards what furrow am I thrown
in what black room
filled with fissures
*
I look at the immediate horizon
that surveys the flesh
cuts scattered in me
like reasons for having passed
buried into a story
of love and disappearance
*
A particle from somewhere else and some other time; a provisional desire of the universe;
a possible path of time. Perhaps I am only that.