from Monstres Tièdes (“Tepid Monsters”)
Translated from the French by David Jacobson
IV. MASTER SLEEPER
Deep-water master sleeper
defuses
a chatty cadaver's fictive pasts
no one is bound
to the afterworld
With toothless grin sucking
to marrow and mollusk he vows
to make only
needed gestures
even a wink weighs heavy
Mere seconds
divide us
then sea
sky to swallow
to save the drowning man who’d have none of it
pride of the poor we must wheedle
Leathery moons
leashed to our lights
words entrapped on the answering machine
waiting time for rhyme and unreason
half-mourning weeds afloat
Sailor racked by sound above seas
returns to land
on feet of clay
rejoices at flowers
scattered on minefield
Brat bawls his sad ballad
as street-sweeping truck
belts the square clean
a family likeness airs
Teasers those gleaners
of green grapes in spates
from ruin to ruin
a dry laugh frisks our ages
high time to come late
Glass eye and a dazzling set
of dentures
he hawks under wraps
his wormy Pinocchios
will slash
God’s truth
their already low prices
Shamelessly whether quite
young or old
he retouches his
antediluvian nights
a toy car scouts
his slipper’s enormity
Words extorted from the dying
false admissions definitive
an angel’s bored
where a soloist harps on
an avalanche of melodies
At once our dictionaries
will have grown old
we’ll no longer bear
the same name
our silences toughened
by innocent regrets
The world’s grown no younger
just because gramps has died
the staircase still turns
and the windows clapping
thrash at the void
Turning forty alone he upsizes
the dead man’s room
he just walked through
silence askew
so much childhood still to fulfill
To break camp’s not hard
if one never turns back
until the tryst
beyond the clouds
old ladies’ pleasure
to whip up fine fare
Sated we lie
with sun and sea
as we belch out history
of any shadow of empire free
pursued by a drunk widow’s song
Benoît Gréan is the author of 14 books of poetry, a translator of contemporary Italian poets, and a frequent collaborator through his poems with composers and visual artists. Since 1995 he has lived in Rome, where he teaches Latin and classical Greek.
David Jacobson practices psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires and for decades has translated poetry, fiction, film subtitles, art criticism and psychoanalytic theory from German, French, Italian and Spanish.
World Poetry Review 