)
* * *
At what line and on what page did they begin their emigration
the mother asks herself
ought one to connect it to the windows which reflect and stare at each other
to the rains which jump feet together on our roof
the mother had neither pencil nor blackboard to count their leaps
the mother didn’t know how to count
she took them for cats when they were warriors
they weren’t warriors either but curved lines walking in their sleep
Statements of small importance
spreading like phosphorous fire on dry grass
made by someone who soliloquizes underground
her voice imitates the stones in seasons of avalanches and lack of air
The gardeners who fear fires
dig a hole
fill it to the brim with bees
come back the next day
give the honey to the ants
tie the buzzing up in a bundle
they walk with their feet wide apart for fear of being spotted by the fire
and solitude wraps the dead woman who asks for a mirror to re-do her hair
for fear that the drone will take her for a beggar
Tomorrow it will be day
she says each time a sun devours a sun
tomorrow the visitors will go away in turn taking their roads with them
like the walls
like the children
God knows where
Leaning on her broomstick like the Turkish Giaour on his bayonet
the mother would exchange her life for a book
Night, she says, is a blackboard
give me a piece of chalk to write you a letter
what was the weather like the day of my burial?
Did they remember to have chairs for visitors who came with dogs?
did they grind coffee for the insomniacs?
did they wipe their feet on the doormat before crossing the threshold?
Coffee grounds were her only reading matter
she said night
and we would bring in the clouds and laundry hung out on the line
she said sea
and we would pull ourselves up to the skylight and
that milky odor of waves never seen close up
she said gap, said hole and
we would dig furiously to make sure there was earth in the earth
she said letter
and we’d wait on the doorstep for the bad news
the death of a relative or a goat in the snow-bound houses
The mother who lit the oil lamp would turn her back to the sun which dived twice into the
pond at the orphanage
the first time to wash
the second to lift its weight of discontent
Dead, she continues to read the grounds in my morning cup of coffee
Dead
the house continues to turn in her head
dead
she lines up silences that have no connection between them
Bent over my shoulder
the illiterate dead woman watches over what I write
each line adds a wrinkle to my face
each sentence brings her one step closer to the house of NETTLES
She would have reached it if the birds hadn’t pecked up the pebbles on her path
she says birds so as not to say war
she says war so as not to say madness of the son and the pomegranate tree
Sent home from the bombed asylum
he squatted at the foot of the tree which bled when his mother did
no one recognized him
no one drove him away
there was a war and the house had lost its door
“Ma – ma” he said in two syllables
he wanted the dead woman to give back the poems he wrote before the asylum
though she had forbidden him to utter that word
her daughters would stay on her hands forever
no one would marry them
what an idea to ask for poems written before the bombings
“You’ll write other ones, more up-to-date
with no scribbling and no crossings-out
in the third person so no one will know it’s you
in the present having wiped the slate of the past”
that’s what she might have said
Two acrimonious dead people argue in my head
“who’s talking up there ?”
heavy rain answers my question
calling up the discontented dead is enough to bring bad weather
Our cries follow me panting
changing cities or countries does no good
lined up outside my windows dead neighbors keep on putting out the fire
while the real fire was in our mouths
in the loins of the father tying up his son to bury him under the nettles
neither myrrh nor frankincense for the poet who brandished his words like a lamp in the
storm
Buckets of water took the place of tears
Mother of nothing at all
who crosses the years in her faded apron
a washrag in one hand
her dignity in the other
mother honoring the night with her triple-wicked lamp
beating down the gray weather
laying it down on the bare
earthen floor
the better to hear the breathing of the dead
the arguments of underground winds
Time up above was for contemplation
the laundry could wait
the women would hang it out the next day on very high clotheslines
for fear that beetles would nest there
Motionless with the city before her
the mother only traveled in her dreams
stepped across streams
trod on thorns
told off the jackals
threw stones at snakes
the devil’s grass dried on the roof with thyme, and basil cured migraines
made peace among the winds at each other’s throats in the valley
“Throw them out!” the mother would exclaim
no wind is trustworthy
and she pedaled harder on her sewing machine
aprons shrouds bridal gowns one after another in disorder
she cut the thread when night fell
when her lids dropped sewed shut with a fiery thread
A rake in one hand
a pencil in the other
I draw a flowerbed
write a flower with one petal
weed a poem written between waking and sleeping
I make war on snails and adipose adjectives
bitter couch grass grows between my sheets
recalcitrant words go on down to the garden
I hoe
I prune
I weed
replant in my dreams
morning finds me as exhausted as a field ploughed with a rusty harrow
dreams the only means of transportation to reach my mother who lives beneath
She said she was the mother of anyone who could draw a house
that she milked the moon for them
kept its milk in a female jug
far from the sun which had eaten her two windows
and belched up a shard on her doorstep
Seated on the same doorstep
the words of my mother tongue wave to me
I move them away slowly the way she did her kitchen utensils
pot soup bowl ladle basin have traveled from hand to hand
what words will recall the migrations of men and women fleeing genocide drought
famine
children and chickens tied up in the same bundle whether they spoke
gravelly Aramaic
the choppy Arabic of warring tribes
or a language jingling like marbles in our childhood pockets
Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker
SHE SAYS
For Pierre Brunel
There were too many women for too few seasons
some of them turned themselves into willows to sweep the rivers
A dead-end village
the inhabitants’ secrets were posted on swinging doors
the scent of wives handled in darkness impregnated the walls
No rain could erase it
The women existed through their fragrance
and the men had to search for them in the folds of sheets
in the stink of blood washed in copper pots
Monthly labor was the women’s lot
they scrubbed at roofs soiled by the moon’s excretions
and the menstrual blood of pubescent storks,
till they wore the roof-tiles down
It appears that the rainbow was born there
of the rain which came before Noah
a dry rain which dripped pebbles and small stones
And then everything was white
the grass children’s eyes the eyes of rabbits
¶
She says
dig there where a shadow can stand upright
And she closes her door on the trees come to share her mourning
The sugary smell of honeysuckle floats over the street
and announces the coffin borne by just one man
The dead woman is as old as the bougainvillea at her window
The whinnying of a horse makes the shutter clatter
Grief as vast as the garden
as hermetic as the canary’s cage
On Sundays the gardener bears his ladder like a cross
his shears cut branches with the same movement
as they cut a lock of memory
On the windowpane
her tears are dyed red beneath the last sun
¶
For Jean-Guy Pilon
The wind in the fig tree quiets down when she speaks
and speaks up when she’s silent
Once upon a time
she argued with an old man
quarreled with dogs
bartered with a knife grinder
The bed and the salt-shaker can attest to it
not the wardrobe
mute guardian of linens
She howls to frighten her own voice and make the water in pond shudder
chases hawks to see their red cries unleash a storm
dumps out a drawer to hear the knives and forks swear at each other
To run up to the road is only good for her shadow
the rains have erased the fields
and the planet turning on itself will bring her back to her point of departure
She knows the echo is no friend of hers
and the mountain hides another, older mountain
which wouldn’t greet a woman who talks to a tree till she’s out of breath
¶
She only opens her door to the winds who liberate the dead pinned to her mirror to bury them higher up in a hole in the air
The cliff, she says, is crumbling like a poor man’s bread and it’s not those taciturn oaks which will save the landscape’s reputation
She also says that she only has to wait for the fifth season for her dead to come back to her honeyed tears on the apple-tree’s cheeks
They’ll straddle the fog
mount the dogs
soil the hallway
to express their disapproval
Questioning the calends complicates the route of the sun lodged in her chicken house since the hens began laying their eggs in the river
Curses on thresholds that don’t know how to gather footsteps she repeats till it intoxicates her
curses on hands that turn bread into grief
curses on water which becomes frost when you drink it
Her long cohabitation with the mountain taught her that birds migrate at night so they won’t know the road is long
¶
Between her two windows is a mirror
in which in times of mist and absent landscape
she captures the debris of faces which she glues back together
taking into account the silvering’s sap
Ancient faces
she must look for their silhouettes in stelae
their voices in the plane-tree which knows the mirror from behind
and which isn’t done with watching their movements between the house that’s standing and
the toppled one
unable to clarify the ties that connect them
It holds its breath when it sees them step over the fields
penetrate the mirror backwards
push and shove each other there
arguing over the polished surface that’s holding a bit of their souls
A revenge taken on cradles
reunions so often deferred with their odor
strategy for occupying space with emptiness
¶
for André Brincourt
Without the wisteria
the garden would have climbed over the fence to move in on the posh side of the road
The wisteria is its guardrail against drifting
its belt of happiness
its counselor in judging cats and ceding the canary’s cage to the most chaste of them
Without wisteria
there would be no more autumns
only winters with umbrellas which pass each other without exchanging the slightest raindrop
The wisteria flattens out when angels cross it in a gust of wind
a pot of jam under each wing
and on their shoulders the bread of grief
¶
Drunken bread on the table
the salt of discord facing the hearth
everything is ready to welcome them
and the woman who doesn’t trust her lantern
has set the fireflies free
Shapes framed by two moons draw black arrows on the hedge
On their right flows the white cemetery
and the red cemetery flows on their left
They walk two by two
more or less Indian file
separately because they are only one
a single man muddled to death with his fire
“Climb on a lime-tree to go back home!” she cries out to him, pointing to the tree
¶
On the dark landing of her dreams
there is that ploughshare which furrows the floor of her house going from the sink to the bed
where women and cats whelp to the great relief of the canary who announces births
The same ploughshare flakes away beneath the fig-tree since the man’s arms rusted
Scraping clean the dead man and his tools is beyond her forces
December is longer than the whole winter
and rain falling upon rain keeps her from bending over in her sleep
You there!
she calls out at mealtimes to the invisible silhouette
leaning over the furrow
because the dead do sometimes bend
¶
The frost that year shattered both the indoors and the outdoors
The northerners couldn’t write down what time it was
the sun which served as their clock had lost its hoop
They spoke a white language when they ventured onto the rocks
named seven objects tolerated by fire
seven blunt tools
seven herbs to feed a dead man in the family
One hand held as a visor to their brows
they thought they could read a swallow
but it was only a frozen pebble and a rustling of feathers falling feet together
April didn’t help their daily fare
Since they’d pulled up all the devil’s grass
they ate an earth so cold their teeth became diaphanous
A hundred suns led by a thread didn’t outshine their faces caught in the ice
They wrongly accused the layout of the walls
but their misfortune came from an evil moon which spat in their mirror
WHERE DO WORDS COME FROM
Where do words come from?
from what rubbing of sounds are they born
on what flint do they light their wicks
what winds brought them into our mouths
Their past is the rustling of stifled silences
the trumpeting of molten elements
the grunting of stagnant waters
Sometimes
they grip each other with a cry
expand into lamentations
become mist on the windows of dead houses
crystallize into chips of grief on dead lips
attach themselves to a fallen star
dig their hole in nothingness
breathe out strayed souls
Words are rocky tears
the keys to the first doors
they grumble in caverns
lend their ruckus to storms
their silence to bread that’s ovened alive
Translated by Marilyn Hacker
