Michel Deguy: Poems

Watch Michel Deguy reading at 21. Prague Writers' Festival here.

Edge

Why does beloved phrase recur

"At the edge of the world once again"

What is this edge, what is "edge," to-be-on-the-edge

The edging in Baudelaire and

The princes' terrace in Rimbaud

With a view on the world and all of it like

Having passed this way shall come back through that way

Edges

But what an effort, what a secret, what hands in a flash among shad-

­ows and the close darkness of legs, what betrayals, what trust in the

goodness of forbiddance, what a wickerwork of fingers, what brash-

ness, what acrobatic indiscretion, what despair to know, what a taste

for this taste, to succeed in deriving joy from pleasure and that we may

persuade it with wheedling, with bliss, to enter into comparison.

  Everything is dark, and yet dances, dense, dance and cadence; they

cannot hide their joy. So that the share of pain, incomprehensible to the

living, comes from this ledge on the edges of the outside, this reverse

side of the slope where Breughel's blind men drift, at once here and out­-

side of here, into the very hour of gaiety, of binges, of the austral dawn

that surges between two buildings

  "Outside all is wind

 Movement that brings happiness "...

Truths

   Time is almost entirely dead like an elm dying in Europe; I would

like to substitute for this arboreal baldness some truths in rhythm of a

happy conversation. 

   Delinquency has only this aptitude any more: to recognize some­-

thing true in the lively thought of others.

   My "enemies" are not enemies. Dispersion of "truths," to "infinity,"

like species, less denumerable than taxonomies. All of a sudden they

tolerate one another, from where I stand! Do not fight, nor scorn one

another; there was a season for that and the spectacle of plenty.

Catachreses

This room resembles the start of a 100-meter dash before the signal;

all the air is tense; tendons of chairs, recliner forearms, table heels, cur­-

tains of air, everything is tense, waiting to hear the doorbell, your vibra-

­tion, I'll jump if I hear you; I wait for you.

Turning outside to inside over and over, turning the inside out: what

 he is waiting for is not there-visibly: that which is not, neither the out-

­side nor the inside.

Recumbents

I keep losing you since the time in that hotel room

ylien naked and turned aside you shouted at me get out

I no longer recall our quarrel, my mistake

But the paper, your curved back,

The still life of daylight and the wardrobe,

And my painless belief uprisen I would see you again

everything washes away

the present  washes it away

With such force from hour to hour

That from hour to hour there is nothing more

Than the immense Lethe's wave unfurling

Memorandum

What has grounds to be

Goes not without saying

What one cannot say ...

Writing it is necessary

The part gives onto the whole

Which gives the part

Knowing what it resembles

Is our knowledge-non-absolute

Semblance is necessary

To make contiguity

The poem is of things nearby

That one must go seek

Comparison looks after the incomparable

The distinction of things among themselves

Poetry forbids identification

For the sweetness, rigorous, of the like

Community? Comme-unity

Amounts to the same

To act as though

It were a comme-unity

Poetry deprives itself in order to be-like

As a lover devours without devouring

To signify the letter of love

Ut musica utpictura utpoiesis

Constrained by body thanks to the loss

To demote the senses to senses

Depriving itself of what it lacks

The poem entrusts the want thereof to its language

That the blindman be named the seer

We shall never see the end

That's what I wish us but

Open an emergency exit

To get away without seeing the end

 If all has always failed 

Translated from the French by Wilson Baldridge

photo: Petr Machan, PWF 2011