from Plus loin que l’atelier (forthcoming 2025) [“Past the Workshop”]
Translated from the French by Kate Deimling
V
A row of blue children raises my eyelids.
On the table of earth the sky has not poured
The morning’s colors: dawn seeping
Through the shutters opens the gaze.
Waking without you holds a taste of conquered blood.
In my mouth a nettle mixes with spit.
It knows the lips are first sister of the heart
And remembering love touches upon death.
In the tears that begin I do not seek.
Your face I find everywhere like the snow
Covers a forest or stream without wounding them.
Our hands no longer clasp in the night of your room
And you remain in me a sea of motionless boats
On water that offers all its deep light.
VI
This morning as he sits at the table he says
Night destroyed him—in his sleep
War came back with its cries.
Sleep is the bridge to hell: these words
He hammers out without looking at us.
His talk breaks our appetite.
The bread, croissants, coffee become
Decorative objects and for us whose workday
Will soon begin, this is an awkward mishap.
In a few minutes we all must leave for deadlines
And appointments set during the hours of light.
Facing my siblings’ discomfort, urgently
I feel a need to do something for him
And I place my hand on his cheek. With this gesture
Papa turns to us and tries a joke
About the sex of Morpheus, god of dreams
And in my quick filial touch he finds kindness
That pushes back his old man’s fears.
IX
Opening the apartment door
Releases a smell of dust. Once
At the threshold the scent of soup reached us:
Now absence resides says my sister
And she enters the place we spent our childhood winters.
We’re here together, I follow her, we both
Find once more the hallway with green wallpaper,
On the left the bedroom where we slept.
On the right a coat hook grabs my gaze:
Our grandmother hung her coat there
With ceremony we did not question.
This rectangle with three silver hooks
Rekindles a touching, inconvenient past.
It fills my eyes with blurry light
As if memory tried to blind itself.
Tomorrow, a family we don’t know
Will move in here. We’ll never come back.
As soon as we’re outside, let’s throw away the key.
To her requested promise I consent in silence
And before leaving, I take down the piece of wood
Where those whose name we bear
Hung their garments.
XI
Don’t take this path, my father warned,
It leads to the king’s forest, an area
From which men return,
But don’t see this as the luck of survivors—
There is more than death there.
Their eyes fill with dust
And ants swarm over their mouths.
Look and then leave, let the boundary
Suffice for your knowledge of this dark past.
Today (how many years have covered it?)
Here we are again on the threshold of legend.
There, before me, among the leaning trees,
Does a curse begin?
A little wind blows between their leaves.
I hear the gentleness that sometimes comes to the lips
To comfort a child after his nightmare.
XIV
On the wall hangs a cedarwood frame.
There the round face of a woman is painted.
She stares at us with motionless sensuality.
Her eyes are two black pearls shining in anticipation
Of desiring while being desired.
It’s not just her eyes—her hair curls into a forest
For hands to touch and caress,
And her trachea traces a stream where for no man
Did a confession of passion ever reach her lips.
From the yellow of earth that the sun knows
Her cheeks have a light giving the same desire for contact—
To feel her skin on your palm, to move down her neck…
And the portrait ends before her bust.
It brings me face to face with someone
I will never meet—she lived too long
Ago for me to imagine holding her.
As her contemporary, I would have shown her courtesy,
Offering her almonds to nibble, a necklace.
Far from us she continues to attract—is it ridiculous,
Today, in the biggest room in the museum,
That an ancient head awakens
The dream of reaching her, flirting with her, falling in love,
Joining in a kiss where all noise around us would end?
I will not love her, but standing here
Before her openness and her mystery
Leaves me in the mist of a two-thousand-year-old seduction,
Caught wavering as I glimpse
That we would have hit it off.
XIX
Two dots shift in rippling light
Like the beginning of a mirage
And the ophthalmologist’s words return
Since the smallest letters on the chart
Had looked like black dashes in mist:
Twenty/fifty for the left eye, the right is massively compensating.
So I don’t have the eyesight of an archer
But facing certain visual memories
Myopia fades when familiar figures appear:
From childhood their gestures, their movements pervaded my pupils
And at this hour when the sun smokes the air, one kilometer away,
Between scattered shimmers on the horizon,
On a path like a blurry line
In the shapes that walk under the summer sky
I glimpse my parents.
Gabriel Zimmermann’s collection Depuis la cendre (Tarabuste, 2018) won the Prix Max Jacob discovery award and the Académie Française’s Prix Maïse Ploquin-Caunan. Other collections include Atlas de l’invisible (Polder, 2018) and Lapidaires (Tarabuste, 2020) (Prix Méditerranée for poetry). His first novel, D’une aile rognée (L’Harmattan), came out in 2023.
Kate Deimling is a poet, writer, and translator. The Story of the Marquis de Cressy, her translation of a novel by 18th-century author Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, will appear in the MLA Texts and Translations series in 2025, and her debut poetry collection Time Traveling is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2026. Find her online at www.katedeimling.com.
World Poetry Review 