from Cavale (2013)[The Escapades]
Translated from the French by Jesse Amar
Escapade (15)
Your baying convokes a whole series of specters.
Illegible figures.
(they fall silent arranging the screams)
The child picks
in the bushes, a few gooseberries.
The memory of a gloveful of breath. For the face, a caress.
For the brambles have slipped their clutches. Between their fingers.
Woe!
Wounded road.
Escapade (16)
Fossilized light gliding between stars.
It reaches us of its own volition.
What are your words doing there?
They screech like a prehistoric jay.
Of the violence to be vested in mute exchanges. Everywhere
hands clash, shaping the void.
Escapade (33)
You often ask me
what I own, what I have,
besides this stream of words, stream of words
which I carry like a body and my house when the birds come to drink together the drop of water remaining in the dish,
before the frost and the beak’s hardness, powerless to defend.
What I have is not much,
even if, beside barbarous arms
(in couples, peoples or nations), beside singular you (who could do worse), it’s a matter of effective grace: I have love and a voice, not just any but yours. See, it brings me a new fact, in your intruding presence.
You share what I am
and keep what hounds at bay.
Escapade (34)
The whole of the world is a poetic fruit.
Likewise, the bodies of birds merge with the mud
they displace with a peck.
This displacement frees them and hops, unassailable. Only the wind sweeps them away, with the words of children and their imaginary worksite.
The bird frightens our calloused hands. We can hardly hold—so small, so frail—what we used to be. The bird’s body is a living, animal warmth. Its heart beats regular as sleep. Bends towards unity like some kind of friction. But in itself it threatens us, soft and serene, becomes strong. The mud envelops, solid to bursting and barren, no longer allows us to wallow. Speaking becomes the most beautiful human act. Barer than bareness, more bare than the final word.
The living thing paws the ground with abandon.
And the human ear is like a tabernacle.
A repository of great brightness where the invisible panics.
Absence stands in for the body while the latter attends to the head with a kiss on the brow.
Escapade (39)
I trace phenomena
to the organs.
Bounding in my night world
your megaphone mouth
you
pelican bearer of royalty
who make blood flow over the chick-become-thing.
Marie-Noëlle Agniau is a poet, essayist, and educator. She has published over thirty volumes of poetry, philosophy, and belles lettres, as well as collaborative work with visual artists; she is a familiar voice on the radio network RCF, where she presents poetic and philosophical programs. Agniau lives in Limousin, central France, with her husband, the writer Laurent Bourdelas. These poems are excerpted from the collection Cavale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013; a translation under the title The Escapades is forthcoming from World Poetry Books, 2024).
Jesse Amar is a scholar of Classical literature: an occupation which keeps him in touch, in a roundabout way, with poets and poetry. He is interested in poetry which displays deep engagement with texts from the past, while asserting its modernity and uniqueness. The Escapades is his first work as a translator.
World Poetry Review 