The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

JEAN-MICHEL MAULPOIX

What do we know of the blue window through which night suddenly shows
its earthen face? When dying raps at the window, the room is a fragrant casket of
light wood.

Feeling heavy-headed, like a saturated egg on the palm, heart pounding out a
sleepwalker’s words. Hours in ink and snow, weeks of ferns and hoarfrost fusing
with the room’s bluish bowl.
A little black water in the world’s eye, and a longing to let oneself slip under
song’s husk, until one loses the idea of a protective skin.

Dying carves our latches and scatters flowers between the dikes, the baths, the
arched backs and faraway lavender, shouting victory with its white hands be-
witched by handkerchiefs and commotion. Dazzled hull beneath the rigging!

So echoes the heart engorged with muddled love, beating in its shirt of skin,
while the linden blossoms outside the window, color restored like a new boat
after a week of sun and gales.
A great bulwark of leaves whistles in the stays.

2.

I dream of a poem falling like rain on the corollas, its golden stamens fertiliz-
ing an inflorescence of spangled hearts, making other silky and sweet-smelling
planets burst into bloom. I walk beneath the downpour in the drunken field,
through painted vapors.
The ink petals have the same taste as the soul after love.

While spring cries out, I go o√ over snow to world’s end, brushing past the
fissionable heart at the lowest point of eye and bone. Then does the ink crystallize
and sing, resonant white of salt and acid between the vitrifying lips of dread.

All joys downed in one stroke; death concords with birth. We wait in silence,
palms moist and arms hanging limp, like the young woman on the edge of the
bed, heart rocking in its little boat of flesh.

Soon another rises, pulling the stitches on the shroud, hailing the patience of
gods and the pollen-crossed sea. Words like parasols cover his forehead.

3.

Birds thrust out from the sky’s blue. Impossible seedings of flesh and
unheard-of voices. The tree has caught its breath. Warm skin, soft fabric, green
infusion of the body in dreams.
In the thick soul of grass, writing is born to its song.