The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

EUGÈNE GUILLEVIC

Trial Desert

He had left the villages far behind. Toward evening he reached the desert, he
went deep into it. He gave himself over to the stubborn silence of space. He
scarcely slept. The constellations revolved slowly. Then all the night lights of the
sky went out in the pallor of dawn.
Leaning against a cold stone, he saw the light being born. He felt a warmth
rising, then, underneath it, fever. Do not eat.
Heat is taking over. The blaze of day hurts the eyes. Only in hollows of shadow
can you survive, finding another as the light shifts.
Until, quivering like an arrow, the sun has stabbed the zenith. The sky fatally
wounded. The chaos of the ground about to fall into the well above and the soul
into unconsciousness.
So many instants one after another. Nothing is as changeable as they. The
scorpion under the rock. A breath of wind’s feet of dust or stoning by sand.
And even the sun is tired. Stripped of its rays, its embers still suspended, then
suddenly fallen.
Then night again with its chill under a sky of trembling jewels and the wake of
meteorites.
Sleeplessness until the first light of dawn, until the abyss of a dreamless sleep,
absent from oneself until broad daylight.
Before me stretches the future. Behind me, unscalable, the walls of the past.
Closing my eyes. Waiting for you.
Silence. Or almost. But your step is very light.
—mary ann caws and patricia terry

Eugène Guillevic 1907–1997

carnac, france

A

poet who opposed Surrealism in favor of dialectical materialism,

Guillevic was interested in visual poetics, using various geometric

shapes in his poems as things in themselves. He was thirty-five when

his first book, Terraqué, was published in 1942, with great success. During World

War II he joined the Communist Party; in the 1950s some felt his Marxist sympa-