Lucie Thésée

Look straight, and don’t tremble, wreckage of my hanged race: a sarabande dancer, Japanese muslin tight on her live-wire hips arrives with the moonlight, fast as the tam-tam drums. She’ll take you to the grand esplanade where the gallows tell your story, tell of your dim bronze halos licked away by a pale man’s greed. Leave your gallows tears behind, the long-drawn vowels of the lost names of flowers, the long-drawn cries of your burden of grain, the long-drawn cries of your burden of seed-pods, and the long-drawn cries of the seed-pods cut and hung. Shipwreck of my race, twisted in the wind-rush, fall from your broken gallows, wrack, wreck, and driftwood, my bloodied race. My bloodied race fearful, scab-dried, sterile, paralyzed, the low-caste wallflowers trembling at a ball for mice— no. Leave your gallows, there, those: the gallows of time-gone-by. Lift your chestnut-dark and heavy limbs, up from out the shipwreck’s carnage, and up through those long blue-green rolling waves. Sing the wind’s songs, and collect what’s needed, drop by shivering drop, in this, your Lenten fasting, in this, your sorcerer’s midnight, under this, the whip. Leave the gallows, the sap of its cut-wood spits on your skin. You’d hang there, yourself in effigy? No. Live sap runs in the driftwood branch. You’ll play, gentle, a light wind in the shimmering green of a dancer’s beaded muslin skirt, and your broken music will move in the foolish grass that still believes in death— leave your gallows-bones there, in the fool’s green shroud . . . Scratch with the rusted nail of melody, because you live, wreckage of my race, the sky will not forget you, nor the graveyard’s earth, fertile and walled. Your blood still dances, a wreckage of joy, joy soured, obstinate joy, wild and unbroken, shipwreck of my race, sarabande.

Handsome, like those foam-topped tidal waves breaking high, in little crystal globes. Handsome, like the breeze that lifts a little tuft of tulle. If tulle were life. Handsome, like a frozen face, tear-tracked, when the sun hammers down. Handsome. Like fire. Handsome, like the bottomless sky, with that one proud penetrating star. But handsome, too, like a sky that’s an arching ocean, and an earth prone as an ocean’s floor. Handsome ocean-sky, and earth-sea floor. The big question is: where’s the man in a scene like this? Handsome: the man asleep. And the night sky swarms, tropic and wide. Handsome, in some ornamental, muggy midnight caught between cat’s paws. Sharp-nailed: they prick. Handsome: the firefly swarms around you. Handsome, like a soap bubble grazing a little black dress. Like a soap-bubble pricked with a pin. Handsomeness a rainbow, a rainbow an arrow, an arrow in my chest. Handsome, like shadows slow-rolling on a Japanese screen. Handsome motion. Handsome as life and poison. Sun-blood handsome. Bleeding sun. Translated from the French by Robert Archambeau