The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

SALAH STÉTIÉ

In this bed of broken rocks, knotted muscles
Bed of natural violence and sheets of wind
Crater of woeful stone and conch daughter
Over which comes and goes
The shadow of death’s unknown raptor

At last here come the clouds
In which the lamp undoes and redoes itself daughter
Already born of tomorrow O red lamp
Sheer height of nocturnal day
On the house of fire of the dream-maddened
Their sheets twisted like nebulae
Their eyes a delegation of birds toward the center

My daughter my dove
To you through you from you the constriction
That lamp of frost
Yourself half-naked beneath the leaf
In this garden of the One
Where your night goes to love your clarity
A thousand times my heart this shines
Un-scarred-over scar which palpitates
To you through you from you the constriction
Beneath so much fallen rain
In that slumber with the sun in which we sleep
—marilyn hacker