Phrase
And why not the hedge of geysers the obelisks of hours the smooth cry of clouds the quartered sea pale green bedunged by good-for-nothing birds and hope playing marbles on the beams and for-the-time-beings of houses and the sea bream rips of banana tree suckers
in the top branches of the sun on the stubbed heart of mornings on the acrid canvas of the sky a day of chalk of falcon of rain and acacia on a portulan of primeval islands shaking their salt hair interposed by fingers of masts in every hand to every purpose beneath the batting of an eyelash of chance with its shadow sung delights an assassin clad in rich and calm muslins like a chant of hard wine
Aimé Césaire (1946), translated from the French by Clayton Eshleman and A. James Arnold
THE MODERN PROSE POEM
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Street Cries
They were three street cries.
One when spring had come, late in the afternoon, the balconies open, and floating up to them on the breeze a sharp aroma, rough and hard, that almost tickled your nose. People went by: women dressed in light, sheer fabrics; men, some in black wool or yellowish suits, and others in discolored white linen jackets and carrying wicker lunch trays, empty, on their way home from work. Then, a few streets over, the cry went up – ‘Carnations! Carnations!’ – a slightly muffled cry, whose sound that sharp aroma, that same rough, scratchy scent that rose on the breeze to the opened balconies, converged with and merged in the scent of carnations. Dissolved in the air it had floated nameless, bathing the afternoon, until the cry betrayed it, giving it a voice and a sound, plunging it deep in your chest, like a knife whose scar time will never heal.
The second street cry was at noon, in summer. The awning was unfurled over the patio, keeping the house cool and shady. The door to the street scarcely allowed an echo of light to penetrate the entryway. Water sounded in the drowsy fountain under its corona of green leaves. What a pleasure it was in the laziness of the summer noon, in that sleepy atmosphere, to rock in the wicker rocker. Everything was light, afloat; the world turned slowly, like a soap bubble, delicate, iridescent, unreal. And suddenly, from outside the doors, from the street flooded with sunlight, came the wild cry, like a moan of pleasure, ‘Mackerel!’ The same as when you’re stirred from sleep in the middle of the night and that vague awakening brings with it just enough awareness that you can feel the surrounding calm and quiet, and you turn and fall back to sleep. There was in that cry a sudden bolt of gold and scarlet light, like lightning flashing through the darkness of an aquarium, that sent a sudden chill through your flesh. The world, having stopped for a moment, resumed its smooth turning, turning.
The third cry was at nightfall, in autumn. The lamplighter had already passed, with his long hook on his shoulder, at whose far end flickered the little blue flame like a soul, lighting the streetlamps. The paving stones, damp from the first rains, shone under the bluish gas light. A balcony here, a door there, began to be lit up along the opposite wall, so close together in the narrow street. Then you could hear the blinds being lowered, the shutters closing. Through the balcony’s sheer curtain, his forehead pressed against the cold window, the little boy watched the street for a moment, waiting. Then came the voice of the old peddler, filling the dusk with his hoarse cry, ‘Fresh lavender!’ – the vowels closed in on themselves like the ululating call of an owl. He could be guessed at more than seen, dragging one foot behind him, stormcloud face beneath the hat brim fallen on him like a roof tile, moving, with his sack of lavender over his shoulder, to close the cycle of the year and of life itself.
The first cry was the voice, the pure voice; the second the song, the melody; the third the memory and the echo, voice and melody now vanished.
Luis Cernuda (1943), translated from the Spanish by Stephen Kessler
Rain
The rain, in the courtyard where I watch it fall, comes down at very different speeds. In the centre, it is a fine discontinuous curtain (or mesh), falling implacably but relatively slowly, a drizzle, a never-ending languid precipitation, an intense dose of pure meteor. Not far from the right and left walls heavier drops fall more noisily, separately. Here they seem to be about the size of a grain of wheat, there of a pea, elsewhere nearly a marble. On the moulding, on the window ledges, the rain runs horizontally while on the undersides of these same obstacles it is suspended, plump as a humbug. It streams across the entire surface of a little zinc roof the peephole looks down on, in a thin moiré sheet due to the different currents set in motion by the imperceptible undulations and bumps in the roofing. From the adjoining gutter, where it runs with the restraint of a brook in a nearly level bed, it suddenly plunges in a perfectly vertical, coarsely braided stream to the ground, where it splatters and springs up again flashing like needles.
Each of its forms has a particular speed: each responds with a particular sound. The whole lives as intensely as a complicated mechanism, as precise as it is chancy, a clockwork whose spring is the weight of a given mass of precipitate vapour.
The chiming of the vertical streams on the ground, the gurgling of the gutters, the tiny gong beats multiply and resound all at once in a concert without monotony, not without delicacy.
When the spring is unwound, certain gears continue to function for a while, gradually slowing down, until the whole mechanism grinds to a halt. Then, if the sun comes out, everything is erased, the brilliant apparatus evaporates: it has rained.
Francis Ponge (1942), translated from the French by Beverley Bie Brahic
The Pleasures of the Door
Kings never touch doors.
They’re not familiar with this happiness: to push, gently or roughly before you one of these great friendly panels, to turn towards it to put it back in place – to hold a door in your arms.
The happiness of seizing one of these tall barriers to a room by the porcelain knob of its belly; this quick hand-to-hand, during which your progress slows for a moment, your eye opens up and your whole body adapts to its new apartment.
With a friendly hand you hold on a bit longer, before firmly pushing it back and shutting yourself in – of which you are agreeably assured by the click of the powerful, well-oiled latch.
Francis Ponge (1942), translated from the French by C. K. Williams
Crate
Halfway between crib and cage the French language places crate, a simple slatted box for transporting those fruits that fall ill at the least lack of air.
Built in such a way that it can be broken down effortlessly after use, it is never used twice. It is really more perishable than the deliquescing foodstuffs that it carries.
On the corners of streets that lead to the markets, it gleams like white wood without wood’s vanity. Still very new, and slightly surprised to find itself in this awkward position, having been thrown into the gutter without hope of retrieval, it remains a most likable object on whose fate we will not dwell for long.
Francis Ponge (1942), translated from the French by Joshua Corey and Jean-Luc Garneau
from Vigils
1
At dawn the throb of the bombers coming home.
Pull back the curtains, and see how the noiseless fire of sunrise eats down the chestnut trees. The still chestnut trees with their feet bathed with dew.
There is work to be done, there are friends to be met; today is for laughter, and feet firmly planted on earth, as the dew quivers up into mid-day. The plate-glass river has caught and transposed the blue of the sky like a theme in music.
Across the morning papers the metal-breasted squadrons engage, the furious tanks articulate with flame and the cannon charge in their hundreds, are burst in a rain of shells. There are voices proclaiming that heroes have died, that factories roar, that an abracadabra of figures makes triumph certain. A gruesome sensation: sharks follow a raft of torpedoed seamen for nine days and nights.
Searching among the letters by the coffee-cup for one that still delays. There are three more posts today.
A strange dream
last night about the troop-train. Was I on my way to some distant front, or returning from the battle? What country was that half-lit ruined station in? How clearly I remember those friends of old days, my two companions. Their warm lips parted they tried to explain to me – what was it? And yet they are a thousand miles away, perhaps in other armies; and if alive, who knows?
But if death comes to me? Could happen any moment, any night of bombs and fire.
Forget that darkness. Danger quickens the tide in the veins. Look, the summer-laden trees, the yellow irises along the wall, are more precious for the thought. Look with what style the young airmen march the street, and sailors fling the foam of their living into the smiles that greet them. Being is everything.
There is work to be done. Telephones will be answered, letters posted, new problems faced like rivers, crossing improvised, achieved. Skill of hand or eye adorns triumphantly like flowers or medals.
The tide of the day is at the full. Over the festivals of meat and wine, among the jostling tables, the chances of battle are debated; a new film that opened last night is appraised: a witty story told about a minister. Repulse, endurance, victory, the hero’s death, all glitter like mist that pearls above a fountain.
But if this is only the scarf with which we hide despair? But if the pounding of the guns, the plunging of the massed bomb-racks rubs out, not just this house or that, but the whole monument of love and history? Sands have covered cities, every stone lost and skulls forgotten.
Scattering of yesterday’s friends. Where are the words of love by the window, all the bubble and excitement round the fire? Does the web still hold we wove then? So frail it seems now, stretched to the edge of language by otherness of place and otherness of meaning.
Across the evening paper the squadrons engage, the warships rock in the violent birth of their broadsides. There are prophets shouting in the wings, a grand transformation scene. Prophets, magicians, schemers: but the text is blurred. Is this the promised revolution that will atone for all? The last rung into sunlight? Or only an error, the miscarriage of machines?
Does it matter? Changing is living. Music seduces, breaking from behind the curtain of a bar. We are one now, blood flows between us, meeting and parting, the brief exchange of fondness, is music, is singing, in the lights as we crowd by the piano in the bar. Goodnight, then, goodbye and God bless you.
Let your latchkey into the door, look down eagerly among the scattered letters, the postman’s final visit for the day. Stamps, inks, envelopes, so many voices speaking up from them; but the longed for accents do not answer. Silence.
A great wind is blowing from the centre. Hearths that were red yesterday are now dead ashes, and the wind blowing through the burst-open windows. If we hold on: but how much longer?
The bells begin to chime the hour all over the town, recalling the sweetness of centuries, hope stored like honey in the clustered towers. There was a room once above the street, and your name over the door, and the bells chiming. But that is already like another life.
Come back. There were dreams, there was faith. We must build. Come back from the white skulls and sandstorms of Africa, from the murderous teeth of the sea. Without your laughter confident beside me, without your answering and warm-veined hand, my feet, stepping for the solid earth, find only air.
At dusk, the throb of the bombers going out.
John Lehmann (1942)
Nijinski
He appeared as I was staring at the lighted coals in my fireplace. He held in his hands a large box of red matches which he displayed to me like a conjuror taking an egg out of the nose of the person in the next seat. He struck a match, set fire to the box, disappeared behind an enormous flame, and then stood before me. I recall his crimson smile and his vitreous eyes. A hurdy-gurdy in the street went on repeating the same note. I don’t know how to describe what he was wearing, but he kept making me think of a purple cypress. Gradually his arms began to separate from his taut body and to form a cross. Where did so many birds come from? It was as if he’d had them hidden under his wings. They flew clumsily, madly, violently, knocking against the walls of the narrow room, against the window-panes, then covered the floor as though wounded. I felt a warm layer of down and pulsations growing at my feet. I gazed at him, a strange fever possessed my body like a current coursing through it. When he’d finished raising his arms and his palms were together, he gave a sudden leap, as if the spring of a watch had broken in front of me. He knocked against the ceiling, making it echo with the sound of a cymbal, extended his right arm, seized the wire of the lamp, moved slightly, relaxed, then began to describe with his body a figure of eight against the darkness. The sight made me dizzy and I covered my face with both hands, crushing the darkness against my eyelids, while the hurdy-gurdy went on repeating the same note and then stopped abruptly. A sudden icy wind struck me; I felt my legs go numb. Now I also heard the low velvety sound of a flute, followed immediately by a heavy and regular beating. I opened my eyes and again saw him, standing tiptoe on a crystal sphere in the middle of the room, in his mouth a strange green flute over which he was running his fingers as though there were thousands of them. The birds now came back to life in an extraordinary order, rose up, mingled, formed into a cortège as wide as my outspread arms, and went out into the night through the window that was somehow open. When the last flutter had died away and only a suffocating smell of hunting was left, I decided to look him in the face. There was no face: above the purple body, seemingly headless, he sported a golden mask, of the kind found in Mycenaean tombs, with a pointed beard reaching down to the throat. I tried to get up, but I’d hardly made the first movement when a cataclysmic sound, like a pile of kettledrums collapsing in a funeral march, rooted me to the spot. It was the mask. His face appeared again as I’d originally seen it – the eyes, the smile, and something which I now remarked for the first time: the white skin suspended from two black curls that pinned it into place at the temples. He tried to leap but no longer possessed his initial agility. I think he even stumbled against a book fallen there by accident, and he knelt down on one knee. Now I could observe him carefully. I saw the pores of his skin oozing fine beads of sweat. Something like breathlessness came over me. I tried to discover why his eyes had seemed so strange. He closed them and began to get up; but it must have been terribly difficult, for he seemed to concentrate all his strength without being able to do anything. He even knelt now on the other knee as well. The white skin seemed terribly pale, like yellow ivory, and his black hair was lifeless. Though I was witnessing an agonizing struggle, I had the feeling that I was better, that I’d triumphed over something.
Before I could draw breath I saw him, fallen full length now, plunge into a green pagoda portrayed on my carpet.
George Seferis (1940), translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sherrard
The Right Meaning
‘Mother, you know there is a place somewhere called Paris. It’s a huge place and a long way off and it really is huge.’
My mother turns up my coat collar, not because it’s starting to snow, but in order that it may start.
My father’s wife is in love with me, walking up, always keeping her back to my birth, and her face toward my death. Because I am hers twice: by my goodbye and by my coming home. When I return home, I close her. That is why her eyes gave me so much, pronounced innocent of me, caught in the act of me, everything occurs through finished arrangements, through covenants carried out.
Has my mother confessed me, has she been named publicly? Why doesn’t she give so much to my other brothers? To Victor, for example, the oldest, who is so old now that people say, ‘He looked like his father’s youngest brother!’ It must be because I have travelled so much! It must be because I have lived more!
My mother gives me illuminated permissions to explore my coming-home tales. Face to face with my returning-home life, remembering that I journeyed for two whole hearts through her womb, she blushes and goes deathly pale when I
say in the discourse of the soul: ‘That night I was happy!’ But she grows more sad, she grew more sad.
‘How old you’re getting, son!’
And she walks firmly through the color yellow to cry, because I seem to her to be getting old, on the blade of a sword, in the delta of my face. Weeps with me, grows sad with me. Why should my youth be necessary, if I will always be her son? Why do mothers feel pain when their sons get old, if their age will never equal anyway the age of the mothers? And why, if the sons, the more they get on, merely come nearer to the age of the fathers? My mother cries because I am old in my time and because I will never get old enough to be old in hers!
My goodbyes left from a point in her being more toward the outside than the point in her being to which I come back. I am, because I am so overdue coming back, more the man to my mother than the son to my mother. The purity that lights us both now with three flames lies precisely in that. I say then until I finally fall silent:
‘Mother, you know there is this place somewhere called Paris. It’s a huge place and a long way off and it really is huge.’
The wife of my father, hearing my voice, goes on eating her lunch, and her eyes that will die descend gently along my arms.
César Vallejo (1939), translated from the Spanish by Robert Bly
Blue Notebook, No. 10
There once lived a red-headed man who had no eyes or ears. He also had no hair, so he was only in a manner of speaking called red-haired.
He couldn’t speak, since he had no mouth. He had no nose either.
He didn’t even have arms or legs. And he had no stomach, and he had no back, and he had no spine, and he had no innards at all. He had nothing at all! So there’s no knowing who we are talking about.
The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem Page 20
