The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

ANNIE LE BRUN

Festivals

My teeth have ripped out cubes of laughter, school-leavings of laughter, bot-
tles of laughter, trucks of laughter, parallapipeds of laughter, elevators of laugh-
ter, crates of laughter, cones of laughter, millstones of laughter, suitcases of
laughter, eggshells of laughter, aviaries of laughter, boxes of laughter, bowling
balls of laughter, that’s what my teeth have ripped from the white thread of
despair.
Besides we only laugh to eat the bit of space we lack.

Under quagmires swollen with menacing joy, the nomads’ feet tear up the
paper of the walk, their eyelashes lacerate the cellophane of vision, the nails of
their attention split the parafin tympanum of speech. Words will no longer fly
o√: they are impaled in their place.
In these conditions, the fire in the cardboard of caresses and the detachable,
detached body pieces mount astride the noons of the fleeing instants. Your eyes
take their distance at the moment when the breasts go to drink. I run along the
deserted domain of your back, my bones make ricochets on the mirror of your
muscles. Standing naked, shall we try on until we are exhausted those green, deaf,
and soiled dresses, those terrifying, mauve, sticky, and victorious hats, those
yellow, matinal, canary-blue, and bloody gloves, those snowy, sinister, orange,
and tiny, grey, well-tailored ties, under the precious, white, tumescent, somber
and sovereign coverings of our complicity that make the agile mucous mem-
branes of the hands tremble from a primary uselessness?

The only festivals are subterranean like despair. People play at tracing the
crazed ball of what is and is not.

The only festivals are chancy like despair. Will they totally e√ace the story of
the great famines which preceded them?

The only festivals are fatal like despair. They are thirsty with emptiness; better,
they are a summons to emptiness.

The only festivals are elusive like despair. They float for a brief instant above
the toboggan of veins.

The future will not leave for a trip.

Festivals, like despair, put it to death. For festivals go as quickly.

—mary ann caws