The previous morning I had swum towards an island
That seemed near to me
I did not reach the island
There was a current
Something like that
I could not return
And I really thought I’d die,
I felt very sad
At the idea of drowning
Life seemed long to me
And very sunny
I was only seventeen,
To die without making love
Seemed very sad to me.
Must we touch death
To reach life?
We all have bodies
Fragile, unsatisfied.
17–23
That way Patrick Hallali had of persuading girls
To come into our compartment
We were seventeen eighteen
When I think back to them, I see their eyes shining;
And now saying a word to another person, another human being
Is work in itself, a pain
(In the strongest sense of these words, in the sense they have in ancient writing).
Solitude of the light
In the mountain’s hollow,
While the cold reaches
And closes your eyelids.
Until the day of our death,
Will it be like this?
The aged body desires just as strongly
In the middle of the night
Body all alone in the night,
Starving for tenderness,
The almost-crushed body feels a heart-rending youth reborn within it.
Despite the physical fatigue,
Despite the long walk yesterday
Despite the ‘gastronomical’ meal,
Despite the litres of beer
The tense body, starving for caresses and smiles
Continues to tremble in the morning light
In the eternal, miraculous morning light
On the mountains.
The slightly cool air, the scent of thyme:
These mountains inspire happiness
My gaze rests, moves on,
I strive to chase away fear.
I know that all evil comes from the self,
But the self comes from within
In the clear air there is joy,
But there is fear underneath the skin.
In the heart of this landscape
Of mid-height mountains
I gradually regain courage,
I access the opening of the heart
My hands are no longer shackled,
I feel ready for happiness.
My former obsession and my new fervour,
You quiver in me for a new desire
That’s paradoxical, light like a distant smile
And yet profound like the essential shadow.
(The space between skins
When it can shrink
Opens a world as lovely
As a loud burst of laughter.)
In the morning, chaste and tranquil,
Hope suspended over the city
Hesitates to join men.
(A certain quality of joy,
In the middle of the night,
Is precious.)
DJERBA ‘THE SWEET’
An old man was training for the mini-golf
And birds were singing for no reason:
Was it the happiness from camping at the Gulf?
Was it the heat? Was it the season?
The sun projected my black silhouette
On a grey earth, recently disturbed;
We must interpret the signs of history
And the design of flowers, so snake like.
A second old man near his fellow creature
Wordlessly observed the waves on the horizon
Like a chopped-down tree observes without anger
The muscular movement of the lumberjack.
Towards my shadow advanced lively red ants,
They entered my skin without causing pain;
I suddenly desired a calm and gentle life
Where my intact presence would be passed through.
HOLIDAY-CLUB
The poet is he who smears himself with oil
Before wearing out the masks of survival;
Yesterday afternoon the world was docile,
A breeze blew on the delighted palm trees
And I was both elsewhere and in space,
I knew the South and the three directions
In the impoverished sky traces were drawn,
I imagined executives sitting in their planes
And the hairs of their legs, very similar to mine,
And their moral values, their Hindu mistresses;
The poet is he, almost similar to us,
Who wags his tail in the company of dogs.
I’ll have spent three years at the edge of the pool
Without really making out the tourists’ bodies;
The surface of skins penetrates my retina
Without arousing any living desire.
HOLIDAY-CLUB 2
The sun turned on the waters
Between the edges of the pool;
Monday morning, new desires,
A smell of urine floats in the air.
Right next to the kids club,
A decapitated teddy bear
A disappointed old Tunisian
Blasphemes while baring his teeth.
I was registered for two weeks
On a relational trip,
The nights were a long tunnel
I left covered in hate.
Monday morning, life moves in;
Indifferent ashtrays
Mark my movements
Amidst convivial zones.
HOLIDAYS
Idle time. A white hole appears in life.
Rays of sunlight pivot on the slabs,
The sun sleeps; the afternoon is invariable.
Metallic reflections meet on the sand.
In simmering air, moist and scarcely moving,
You hear passing female insects;
I want to kill myself, join a sect;
I want to move, but it would be useless.
In five hours at most the sky will be dark;
I will wait for morning while crushing flies.
The tenebrae twitch like little mouths;
Morning returns, dry and white, without hope.
The light evolves almost in the forms;
I am still lying on the paving.
I would have to die or go to the beach;
It’s already seven. They’re probably asleep.
I know they will be there if I leave the hotel,
I know they will see me and wear shorts,
I have a diagram of the heart; near the aorta,
The blood turns back. The day will be fine.
Near the parasols, various mammals
Some on a leash and wagging their tails;
In the photo I look like a happy child;
I’d like to lie down in the Umbelliferae.
No shadow replies; the heavens are blue and empty
And that mongoloid girl in a ‘Predator’ t-shirt
Vainly strings words in morbid gurglings
While her parents support her efforts.
A retired postman slips on his cycling shorts
Before trying his best acrobatic moves
To suck in his belly. A very sad young girl
Follows the waterline; holds an ace of spades.
No noise on the horizon, no cries in the clouds;
The day is organised into groups of habits
And some pensioners gather seashells;
All breathe the flat, the white, the finite.
An Algerian sweeps the floor of the ‘Dallas’,
Opens the bay windows; his eyes are pensive.
On the beach a few condoms can be found;
A new day is rising on Palavas.
This desire to no longer do an
ything and especially to no longer feel anything,
This sudden need to fall silent and detach oneself
In the Jardin du Luxembourg, so calm
To be an old senator growing old under its palms
And nothing at all, not the children, not their boats, especially not the music
Would come and trouble this disenchanted and almost ataraxic meditation;
Especially not love, not fear.
Ah! to no longer remember embraces.
A rapid sunny morning,
And I want to succeed at death.
I read in their eyes an effort:
My God, how insipid is man!
One is never serene enough
To bear the autumn days,
God how life is monotonous,
How distant are the horizons!
One winter morning, gently,
Far from the homes of men;
Desire for a dream, absolutely,
For a memory that nothing erases.
The abolished arc of slender sadness
In an imperceptible, final struggle
Hardens jointly, minimal;
The dice are half cast.
The central exhaustion of a starless night
Adorned with nothingness
(Compassionate oblivion has drawn its veil
Over things and men).
The bizarre element
Scattered in the water
Awakens memory,
Rises to the brain
Like Bulgarian wine.
THE MEMORY OF THE SEA
A blue light settles on the city;
It is time to play your games.
The traffic decreases. Everything stops. The city is so tranquil.
In a grey fog, fear at the back of our eyes,
We march towards the city,
We cross the city.
Near the armoured cars, the army of beggars,
Like a puddle of shadow,
Wends its way amidst the debris;
Your brother is one of the beggars
He is one of the wanderers
I do not forget your brother,
I do not forget the game.
Rice is bought in covered arcades,
Encircled by hate
The night is uncertain
The night is almost red
Crossing all the years, deep inside me, it moves,
The memory of the sea.
She lived in a bijou cottage
With some thread and dolls
The sun and rain passed without pausing on her little home
Nothing happened except the sound of the clock hands
And the little embroidered objects
Amassed for her nephews and nieces
For she had three sisters
Who had children,
Since her heartbreak
She no longer had lovers
And in her bijou cottage
She sewed as she dreamed.
Around her house there were fields
And high grassy slopes,
Superb poppies
Where she sometimes liked to walk for a very long time.
So calm, in her coma
She had agreed to take some risks
(Like you sometimes bear the sun, and its disk,
Before the pain becomes too cruel),
Supposing that everyone was like her,
But of course this was not the case.
She could have led a full and gentle life
Among animals and little children
But she had chosen human society,
And she was so beautiful, aged nineteen.
Her blond hair on the pillow
Formed a strange halo,
Like the intercessor of an angel
And of a drowned man.
So calm, definitively beautiful,
She barely moved the sheets
While breathing; but did she dream?
She seemed happy, in any case.
HMT
I. At heart I have always known
That I would find love
And that this would be
On the eve of my death.
I have always been confident,
I have never given up
Long before your presence,
You were announced to me.
So you will be the one
My real presence
I will bask in the joy
Of your non-fictional skin
So soft to the caress,
So light and so fine
Entity non-divine,
Animal of tenderness.
II. For I who was King of Bohemia
Who was an innocent animal
Desire for life, insistent dream,
A theorem’s demonstration
There is no essential enigma
I know the place and the instant
The central point, absolutely,
Of the partial revelation.
In the sleeping starless night,
At the confines of matter,
A state of prayer settles:
The second secret is revealed.
III. When I have to leave this world
Make it be in your presence
Make it that in my last seconds
I look at you with trust
Tender animal with arousing breasts
That I cup in my hands;
I close my eyes: your white body
Marks the limit of the kingdom.
IV. A morning of grand clear fine weather,
Filled with carnal thoughts
And then the great ebb of blood,
Life that leaves laughing
To fill new entities
Life has not lasted long,
The end of day is so fine.
V. A mobile phone
Left on the beach,
The inevitable end
Of a passing affair
And death that advances
With little plaintive cries,
Dancing its odd dance
On my emotional centre
Which climbs into the bed,
Lifts the covers;
My abolished love,
Why is everything so hard?
VI. After a few months
(Or a few weeks)
You got tired of me,
You I had made queen.
I knew the risk,
As an experienced mortal;
The sun, like a disk,
Shines on my broken life.
VII. There is no love
(Not nearly, not enough)
We live unaided,
We die abandoned.
The appeal for pity
Resonates in the void
Our bodies are crippled,
But our flesh is eager.
Gone are the promises
Of a teenage body,
We enter an old age
Where nothing awaits us
Except the vain memory
Of our lost days,
A convulsion of hate
And naked despair.
VIII. My life, my life, my ancient one
My first badly healed desire
My first crippled love
You had to return
It was necessary to know
What is best in our lives,
When two bodies play with happiness,
Unite, are reborn without end.
Entered into complete dependency
I know the trembling of being
The hesitation to disappear
The sunlight upon the forest’s edge
And love, where all is easy,
Where all is given in the instant
There exists, in the midst of time,
The possibility of an island.
I am in a tunnel made of compact rocks
RELIGIOUS VOCATION
I am in a tunnel made of compact rocks;
Two
feet from my left a man with no eyelids
Gazes at me; he says he is free and proud.
Far away, farther than everything, a waterfall roars.
It is the mountains’ end and the final stop;
The other man has disappeared. I will go on alone;
The tunnel’s walls seem to be made of basalt,
It is cold. I think again of the land of gladioli.
The next morning the air tastes of salt;
Then I can feel a double presence.
On the grey earth snakes a deep and dense line,
Like the abolished ark of an ancient religion.
I have always had the impression that we were close, like two pieces of fruit from the same branch. Day is dawning as I write to you, thunder rumbles faintly; today it will rain. I imagine you rising in your bed. That anguish you feel, I feel it too.
Night abandons us,
Light again
Defines people,
Tiny people.
Lying on the carpet, I observe with resignation the rising light. I see some strands of hair on the carpet; it is not your hair. A solitary insect climbs the stalks of wool. My head slumps down, lifts back up; I feel like truly closing my eyes. I have not slept for three days; I have not worked for three months. I think of you.
NEW ORDER
for Michel Bulteau
We had reached a moment in our life when you felt the imperious necessity to negotiate a new order,
Or just to die.
When we were face to face with ourselves on the seat at the back of the garage there was no one else left,
We liked seeking ourselves.
The slightly oily ground where we slipped with a bottle of beer in our hands
And your satin dress,
My angel
We have lived some very strange moments
When friends disappeared one by one and when the gentle ones became the hardest,
Settled into a sort of fissure
Between the long white walls of pharmaceutical dependency
They became ironic puppets,
Pathetic.
Lyricism and passion, we have known them better than anyone,
Much better than anyone
For we dug to the depths of our organs to try to transform them from within