The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

ANNE-MARIE ALBIACH

The Hermitage Road

Parallel life of corporeal horizons already lived—the ties loosen along a trajectory,

leaving to silence a dynamic of power or of destruction.

The contour of an outline constrains the masked face and the limbs, encloses
wrists and wristlets, neck and neck band. Lewdness of earliest hours; light on
lifting eyelids, distinct in color. Under the lace cap, silver-tinted hair ‘‘emerges in
a flowering of unsuspected seasons.’’

Facing these accomplices in their preferred setting, soft skirts white and trimly
belted, she verifies with both hands the precise point of the mask, where feminine
and masculine become exacerbated. In the penumbra of the double, they look on
with calm, a fragility in their frills of evanescent blue. An uncertain dream issues
from her to them, a whiteness meanwhile irradiating our impulses.
How pierce this luminosity, which cancels the most ardent spectator. Two
ardors, one white, the other scarlet, separated by the curtain of a distance fash-
ioned as by time’s occlusions.
All that in an immediate memory.
A stake plays the positions, meandering a reflection, while she keeps to mo-
tions that alter this immobility.

They question their eyes. They’d be unable to say that what had been immo-
bile would remain so, and they rush headlong into the world of the instant,
which would wear this mask of a playtime present.
They could no longer know who he is, whose eyes gave power to understand
these foreign words, power from nothing but a passion, rent or perfect—‘‘my lips
on your lips’’—and a frustrated dumbness, this irreproachable absence. Speed of
chance in the chill of a fever, vertigo.

—keith waldrop