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…………I’m not looking to write phrases that glide, but phrases that scrape the paper, distanced from awe, sentences so involuntary that no one knows how they end
…………when I’m running beneath American oaks and hickories, hurricane season, cicadas thickening the ceiling of branches, confessions at hand, but how to know if the hand speaks truth,
…………this one here, my hand, writes that I run beneath the oaks and hickories of America, but it knows there’s a choice between running and writing–and besides what’s this story of American hickories,
…………they frame the stage of course, the one where way becomes highway, the one from Atlanta to Providence, and if the impulse strikes I’ll get the car this instant, tonight I’ll sleep at Keith and Rosmarie’s,
…………the mattress pressed to the floor, the books filling the house, books even in the john, I say “john” to show my age–words are signatures, even if the poem doesn’t always join
…………the two ends, you see trees while running, you don’t always know their names, even after consulting the guide you get nowhere, except that the names are lovelier than the trees,
…………like the American walnut or hickory whose relation to the hiccup remains unknown, and the squirrels run up and down its length, their claws on the bark make the sound
…………of little sewing machines, I hate the noises they make in their throats, when I imitate them they stop scrabbling, not fooled, but intrigued, and I want to chase them down, blustering after their butts,
…………it’s pretty small, the butt of an American squirrel, you can run after it forever, even Poussette never caught one, Poussette, my Siamese cat, born in North Carolina, died
…………in Kimerc’h, I decorated her tomb with pebbles I gathered on the beach at Pentrez, I painted them all different colors and that summer the rosebush I planted flowered twice in front of the colored stones,
…………it’s easy to write when you’re not trying to become, the sounds aren’t real sounds, the dead stay dead and they belong to you, they haven’t finished their violence, when you’re not paying attention
…………they suck your blood, doubtless afraid you’ll forget them, afraid of the time that passes and the living who, without prejudice, without will, create disorder everywhere in the name of order, you say it’s a dog’s life,
…………but there are tricks in language, why life’s a bitch, why a hell of a life, why not question everything at once, casting furtive glances around you, I hear already the murmur of a penny dreadful
…………it begins under the leaves of a hickory one summer evening while the grumbles of hurricane Ophelia recede with the water, in the wreckage of Katrina I remember Isabel and Gloria,
…………the exile leads a double life, the word fear no longer makes me afraid, it’s the word under dark glasses that marshaled me, dead, the word fear doesn’t make me sing anymore, I don’t explain things to myself anymore,
…………no poem besides the concrete, no poem, no story, the visit to the purple iris, the white wine sipped on the terrace, the droplet on the outside of the glass stops at the level of the wine, you lift the glass by the base to save the dew, no more visits to the purple iris,
…………the condition “exile” is the preamble, banality of the excess of tongues and the absence of language, a squirrel exile flattened in the road, telephone poles dressed as forests, before I ran, hurried,
…………now I advance at a snail’s pace, at night the world becomes flat as a plate, and I’m not afraid to slip from the plate, odd conversations in the bedroom with the white walls,
…………I’ll out my selves while I’m at it, the trains rattle past, the planes take off, piers and parking lots in a world that doesn’t exist, under blue sky the tan skins circle the world–above all
…………don’t stay put, above all don’t become too detached, I run in the woods of North Carolina, between the birds you hear the ringing of phones, with a hop I avoid a long green snake,
…………write badly, that’s what it takes, because you’re convinced that all literature is baloney, but then all the prose and all the poetry, in the woods where I’m running beauties run, speaking many languages,
…………and since there are no fauns or nymphs under the miles of greenery, I lend the snake a certain delicacy of manners, fine movements that draw contours in the dust, what the snake writes
…………speaks in harmony with houses in woods lit from afar by televisions and computer screens, it’s the snake’s lot to pass under car tires so cushioned with shocks they don’t register the slightest tremor,
…………not only snakes, but toads, frogs, squirrels, opossums, raccoons, and wasps, gnats, dragonflies, moths, go ahead–weep, the South illuminated
…………by its battlefields, the world over, the ambivalent defeated have a lot to hide, their re-painted icons, scattered words don’t make a language, you take yourself so seriously you don’t learn how to live,
…………I think of yours truly, running in North Carolina woods, not really living, but not dead because you run, exile, age and forgetting–stop, you’ll make us cry, your muzzle against the glass,
…………sharp pain in my side, there are moments when writing spins off only to fall clumsily into rhetoric, I still fall prey to the siren songs of the worst, I chop my prose into little bites,
…………it’s the sty’s lot to portray the spirit of the age, a thousand snouts fighting to gulp the right soup, a thousand butts shitting, the voices of pigs at feeding time sing louder than poetry,
…………we used to feed this to the pigs: a mixture of whole milk, boiled new potatoes and bran, you stirred it, up to your elbows in a cauldron, and you could eat it,
…………and now, if I wanted to speak of rabbits, I would start with the mother rabbits who eat their young, and us, we had to feed them, blade in hand, cutting dandelions for the box or the bag,
…………speaking of pigs and rabbits is vulgar, I don’t know anything more beautiful than the vulgar, the urine smell of the hutch, the males who thump their butts against the ground, a whole life in a cage of rabbits,
…………it’s vulgar to speak of dogs, but some philosophers lived like dogs and think like dogs, the older I get, the more I shuffle and dance in place and move my arms
…………tossing everything on the floor, isn’t it a shame this literary aping, me I’m happy in the car, the Blue Ridge three hours away, fifty miles an hour to keep big words at a distance,
…………ready to cry at a Cherokee sunset, the bad parts of the American sky, sad like generations of ancestors, catalogued, mustachioed, in their Sunday clothes,
…………ah, how the September 19th sun brightens the head of a blue jay whose black eyes tell a story, the sound of the car rolling on the asphalt, my hands on the wheel,
…………the memory of memories, there, we used to cut purple asters, there, we horsed around in the gullies, I glide down the road through the mountains in the midst of birds whose names I don’t always know–
…………their cries through the lowered window create an emptiness, damned pursuit of happiness, at night you hear the bear beget the bear, the fox beget the fox, all the social fauna drink from the brooks,
…………through the open window the moon’s mistake rattled by branches, many years ago, in a Blue Ridge motel–how did I get here while I was running in the fields,
…………while at the last second I sidestep the long green snake, very thin, who leaves his snake imprint in the dust, the order of words isn’t the reality, a page of writing demands continuity,
…………how can you write: I run, when you don’t run it’s easy to write: I run, you can write a poem in your head when you’re running, but as soon as it’s laid out on paper, funny expression,
…………only wind will remain, all poems fall from my hands, I expect the meantime to strike me, one late summer morning, post-hurricane, at the doctor’s I finally understood that time doesn’t mean,
…………here, in the South, you cry each Sunday for judgment day, and what will you do when death in his tall hat comes to find you, obedient, you’ll get into the carriage,
…………the wik-ha-wak softened by a bed of sand, it will disappear into nothing, the afterlife is not life, there’s no salvation in words, they never say anything but the impotence of saying,
…………there’s the language of polished granite, adorned with a ceramic cherub who beats his wings, the urn of cold ashes lowered into the earth, and over the wall the bay drowned in light, the ships rising up against the wind,
…………in my head I have a field of buttercups, in spring the teacher drove the class there singing, no photos exist of these moments, there’s truth in photos, sometimes too much, so you hide them in the dresser,
…………there’s no other afterlife except in photos, at the end of two generations what remains, whose wedding was that, the woman smirking with cold-water eyes, what was her name,
…………leaving traces, not leaving traces, the babies born with new forms, they are not yet enslaved to love, with their calm eyes like fists they push away chins that scratch,
…………at the end of never-ending meals where everyone talks loudly they get the smacks they’ll remember all their lives, the smell of dogs under the table, the hens in the hall, the sunken path
…………changed to a flood, the sky of closed eyes, the formless searching for a form–new forms don’t appear on the threshing floor despite the sound of the engine and the friction of the belts,
…………that evening, hearing my mother cry, I searched for the origin of her tears, I never saw my father cry, shout, yes, red-faced, mad at himself, my father never
…………knew irony, parody, derision, it was enough for him to believe the world would always be the world and the world was, what did he dream of, my father never knew the unconscious,
…………that goes without saying, no more than us my father never had any ambition but to obey, my mother was something else, in her senile madness she spoke to the dead, she spoke to God, she would have broken God
…………with a crowbar, she would have ordered him to prove his non-existence, my mother could have been God-made-woman, it’s strange to think that we’ve forever outlived her large calloused hand,
…………I cannot stop talking to the dead, for a time after they die they smell like honey, I could not cry, I had to pull myself together, blow by blow, my life jumps from character to character, and I still root
…………for each of them, and there is no good reason for all of this, you have nothing to fear but the death of the tongue, how to represent its death, the tongue carries within her an order that you can’t command,
…………I no longer want a language of ties, I don’t want a tongue that tears, such October heat, every second a memory begins, the gilded houses, the absence of wind, children’s games
…………under the American oaks and hickories, with ears pressed to trunks they hear the trees talk amongst themselves, the kids are steeped in childhood memories, they forge them everyday
…………out of primeval darkness, moving by the grace of blue sky, the boys leaping with loud cries on the trampoline sing chaos theory, I don’t cast the stone
…………at the snake’s child, I don’t step on him, I push him away carefully with the help of a branch, let him slither toward the stream in the thickness of dead leaves, the man who ages
…………is like his father, he won’t cry as he dies, relieved to rid himself of life, there is always an end to our episode, what do the adventures matter, it’s the death rattle that searches
…………the lower regions, the insides returning to the surface with the sound of tearing membrane, the father lovingly attended in the hospital room, in silence until the hour the sun brightens the hawthorns,
…………the dawn rises without a crow, the beauty of the world glides on weeds, you tell yourself this day will be like all the others, with a morning and evening, you’ll lie down in the afternoon, and in sleep
…………there won’t be a ghost, in the minority language there is no concept of minority, in the language of the majority everybody wants to be loved, all the love songs talk about terror,
…………the huge noise of insects outside, the huge, the marvelous North Carolina insects call out to each other in the night, racket of last judgment, forehead on the pane I try to see over the confusion of sounds–
…………the telephone rings, and it’s Dublin, London, Paris calling, it took time to learn to live alone, when you say: that’s life, you don’t know what you’re saying, is it kiez ar bed, one hell of a life,
…………you probably mean the stroke of luck, the accident, since all life is a loss how unfamiliar are the features of the women I loved, they hide their faces in their hands,
…………the traces you keep are the marks of slithering in the dust, a long green snake crossed the path, with a leap I avoided him, his sound of dead leaves in the woods,
…………the tail end of life, what can I make of it, not fear of death, not the storm, not the work of forgetting, not lofty wisdom, not florid words, not erudition, not for the world.