Light of the Fig
I imagine the crocuses also sometimes come down unexpectedly
feverish, spreading
their long green leaves through the wrong season. So it’s
October 7. We’re living
an Indian summer: hot and a little empty maybe but at least
we’re living. Lots of people
laugh in the street. The primary examples of existence
include:
someone says hi like he wanted to sleep with you but knows
simply and sadly
that he won’t. Or it’s your own wild translation from
the wet fringes
of his voice to a word less and less likely:
hope. Nevertheless
we’re alive. Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh, Asher Brown, and
Billy Lucas
are dead, 18, 13, 13, 15. The only way to escape
their enemies.
You, you were luckier in the end when
you were 12
they chased you with their knives, they were such
sensitive animals
they could smell what you didn’t even know. But you,
you had paws
strong enough to dig out your tunnels and get away
and now
you place sad stones, so completely hardened
with sadness
along the alley of the absences. You’re there now in the dead
space of their acts of love, you never
pray but once in a while you make promises:
next time
Oh my god
in fact it’s already happened and putting the condom on him
I knew I was becoming you.
He was called Nurettin. Light of the fig, it means. It’s so poetic
immediately
a shower of gravelly violet light. We’re sitting
between two
purple rhododendron bushes on a cold stone bench
“Probably ‘bush’
and ‘buisson’ have the same origin” “Probably” although really I
have no idea.
The clouds seem like they want to pull a sheet of metal-gray
at all costs across the sky,
maybe it’s going to rain, the garden empties expectantly,
but it didn’t rain
and we played out one ridiculous game
of seduction.
The pinky finger in his language is called hummingbird because
of its twig-like fragility.
And another one finally later we ended up in my bed “I
don’t have much
experience” “No it doesn’t matter, experience is about
sexual pleasure
inexperience is about immortality,” it came out like that in
pseudo-English
because immortality needs a global language. The strangest moment
is when he stops rimming me to rinse his mouth
with rubbing alcohol. But ok. Of course one of the poets I dream
of being
already objected to displays like these. This poet would prefer
that my own night
speak my lines: some fruits have shells that are fuzzy
and plush
and there you’d be received—but it’s useless with these dead
almond trees. Or put another way:
“there is no empty time in people’s lives” (Arlette Farge). This,
for example,
is a morning: incandescent like all the mornings on which it’s
still possible
to get up and add some hours to the biography.
Justin Aaberg,
Raymond Chase are dead. 15, 19. If it means anything, I willingly
dedicate to you
the improbable temperatures of October 10. Oh look
the next next day
rolling in for us, and with it childhood’s child crouched against
the morning light.
On his face: anxiety, anticipation. But surely it’s
not today
he’s going to meet the big dark unknown
promised
by certain horoscopes. Surely not today, or ever. You,
just now,
so far from that child, you’ve got Nurettin. Each time you
make love
you bury yourself frantically into his chest
as if he
could keep you from sinking any deeper into goodbye. But
as soon as he leaves
the backlash: what’s left? Nothing, autumn, the leaves
shrivel
dry and burning, then they flee into the void. Paid by the city,
the gardeners
rake them pile them throw them into trucks
and it’s over.
Probably no one asks them, say, would you rather
be incinerated
or serve as fertilizer in the next world? And if we’re
lucky enough to attend
the next showing of the young trees, the saddest part is that
they’ll be
other leaves and we’ll have so few weeks to learn
to recognize them
to know the name of each one. Speaking of names, in
Beverly Hills 90210
Ian and Teddy’s love affairs seem to be going well, that’s
just about how
we’re living, isn’t it? As far as possible from our
disappointments, as close as possible
to the tally of days taking place, even if they’re filled with
trash tv.
Oh it’s intoxicating the chase, the gull always in flight
refusing
and refusing to come down and land on death.
Actually
to be less specific: the chase is intoxicating period.
Otherwise
October 15 is a day of dingy foam, the fall having
thrown itself
into the cold currents with its head down. This morning however
there’s something
blinking a friendly message from Nurettin full of Turkishisms
if that’s
how you say it and it reminds me of the auto-translated
email from Cuba:
“Already I want to have you in me some arms so that you do
to me all that
you finish saying to me, have much need of you.” It’s
undeniable
that their faces are all the more splendid, flickering
as they can
in language, undeniable that all you do is add the right amount
of sentimental sun.
After which you watch them appear. Like exactly
3 weeks ago
at the foot of Poseidon’s temple in white ruins at Sounion
“the marble
from this region is less durable and corroded by the salt”
said the guide
she wouldn’t stop talking about the sea-god, I wanted
to interrupt
no god is only the god of some one thing, brush up
on your polytheism,
they all work together to ensure their survival, and
ours with it
but wisely I kept listening and it wasn’t
completely useless either
problems with the gold mines and food supplies
and the economy
and Attic navigation in the classical age right up until she says
you have
40 minutes of free time. Immediately someone’s sitting
at the top of the cliff
someone who contained within him a young virgin priestess and
who waited and who was hoping
in the end, 18 minutes left, that the silhouette of god would rise
above the fishy sea
and it happened: from here, rocks and tawny earth, tourists
and buses
both invisible and inaudible because of the wind, and the present
emerged from the climate
& spread itself over things, which is to say that she and the one
who contained her had
above all the impression that the world had struck them, gently,
tenderly. Don’t worry
it murmured I only want to say that we’re alive.
Cody Barker,
Zach Harrington are dead. 17, 19. You back then
they made you lick
the tiled floor and beat you in the high school stairwells but
it would’ve taken
a much more penetrating enemy to make you stop there with
so little and so
quick. “How can I die, I who have never lived? I who have never
roamed a moor to meet him!” (Balzac).
The strategy was to go down and breathe the communal and
more rarely mortal sphere
of language beneath adolescent shelters of silence, to become
the perfect pupil
of continuity, not brilliant but perfect and industrious. In fact
if I could have
I would’ve taught you all: it’s not hard to add sentences
and days
without losing anything along the way.
One day it rains. One day it’s dry and cold.
Today there’s rain and a face above lambswool reading
in the café
and that on the other hand is a mortal danger: suddenly
the songs on the radio
all seem to have the same secret refrain: everything’s over or
rather it’s terribly
about to end. Before, I would have had
some stirring things to say
because all the windows started shaking with
the emotion
of his departure, but I don’t have time for it now.
Nurettin called to say
he’s on the way home from school. Of course, one of the poets I
dream of being wouldn’t include
so much circumstance. The poet who would say that a smile
alone will tell me
open my face to him and it will reveal, if I come down
to live in constraint
where all the verbs have lost their singulars, the grand écriture
understood by trees
and the society of animals. But the truth is that
Nurettin had
“The Aging Population and the Retirement System”
or something
like that and that he’s only going to help me cross
the bridge of hours
and leave me gently on the other side of anguish. Is that
where I’ve
arrived? October 22. Colder and colder, so cold that
no more flies
beat themselves stupidly against the windows, what a shame,
I like
the flies and all the insects that aren’t trapped by the desire
to say I
within the species. Imagine a world without
the first person where everything
started with you, with them. Bumblebee honeybee dragonfly
short-lived cricket
look the countries arise and it’s enough to flutter
innocently
from one to the other. If I weren’t so tired I could invent
for us
an electric lavender for automatic honey, greenhouses
for butterflies, thickets
teeming with caterpillars, a burgeoning anonymous happiness.
But I don’t even know
what time I went to bed last night. At Édouard Ropars’s party
there were
people I hadn’t seen in forever—which means forever
had time
to have passed—and also a beautiful bearded architect, that
superfluous type of shepherd boy
and I thought, I could trust him with the construction
of my tomb
and later: in such alleys of the species someone has died it’s not
very
important but it’s not negligible either. Such coincidence this
morning,
another surge of morning, another darling timid morning,
I find
in my inbox the photo of a soldier who’s sweeping
the alleys
of a military cemetery after a volcanic eruption. A friend
has remembered
that more than anything I like putting the days in order, endlessly
counting out the rhythm of things,
which is to say everything that needs to be evacuated immediately
from death also I love
to sweep just to keep the territories of the fare-thee-well a little
in the light. Poets
without borders, that’s the organization I’m in charge of,
every day it issues
bulletins of survival. It’s October 25 and we’re alive.
Brandon Bitner is dead.
14. There’s nothing much to add: maybe the color
of the sky, maybe
the group of pigeons flying in the color of the sky, maybe the
stale brioche
I had at 9:42 this morning. 5:38 this evening I just re-read
Coleridge’s conversations
he talked to someone too, wanted to talk
to someone
made up little characters in the form of pronouns and there
you have it. “To thee, for whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.” There’s still indeed
so much gossip to share
even if there’s no news of Ian and Teddy, almost like
they’ve been
kicked off the show. The same show doubtless
so interesting because
actors of 32 play high-schoolers of 17. Maybe out there in
Beverly Hills
it’s a micro-climate of eternal stagnation, maybe some bizarre
fold in time
that superposes the ages. Their modus vivendi. On the other hand
for us,
as someone was saying last night at dinner, it’s as if
it were raining
ceaselessly on stage and we dried ourselves off against each other.
It’s our modus vivendi.
In any case, it’s a matter of carving some space in
the moment
always emerging from new verbs. A strangely warm day
happened
and when I re-read that last sentence I’m not quite sure
I understand it
surely I wanted to say that I prefer verbs to nouns
and now
probably sentences to verbs and even more the stubborn ivy
that spreads
everywhere warmly wrapping the pillars and
the windows
of the library where we read, filtered red autumn
just at the moment
when the doors open. Oh beware fantasy.
It’d be better to focus
on the documentaries of morning, when Nurettin turns
over in bed
and lightning, his shoulders wide as seagull wings close back
on the dawn
& me inside it. One of the poets you imitate mutely says that the
broken torsos
of antique gods hide fortunes or predictions for the future, i.e.
change your life.
But you think instead that Nurettin shelters
all murmurs and all whisperings. This is a morning: astounding
by definition. It’s October 31 and feels like spring
again
except the leaves have already broken into the dry zone
of the end. A fly
lets itself be fooled and is buzzing, poor thing, tomorrow she’ll
be dead again from cold,
exactly 17 years ago a young man named after a river lost
his heart
at the exit of a club. 23. Overdose, heroin and cocaine.
Not us.
We’ve lived up to now and now we’re going to get through
one more winter
even if a certain number of our species surely won’t.
(translated by Lindsay Turner)
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