Pierre Martory

The flowers I planted along my road Have lasted long despite winds and cold Already fiery noons begin to burn Slyly the secret of the roots And I know that of my footsteps nothing will remain But a trace a cluster a drop To recall along the paths I’ve chosen Those evening when the light sang In eyes hands hearts and goblets. I love the sweet harshness on the tongue Filling the palate with a promised saliva Knocking the mute keyboard of the teeth With raised draperies of which one might say That memory retains a fleeting trail of them Half-glimpsed we won’t know how or else The loud reminder of the single moment All gravity banished the unconscious pleasure recaptured Of being nothing but entirely animal. For our life closed on that iridescent sphere —Color taste perfume at their extreme limits—invokes Some miracle independent of its origin Produced by distilling air and earth— Like the move toward technological planets After a calculation made on the fingers of one hand— Time contained flowing—continual autumn This evening this wine that enters me to make My head light my tongue loose my cock happy.

You should have heard the soldiers’ feet wounding the swirls that the accordion waltz left on the pavement like a mower’s swath once the parade had passed you should have kissed the soldiers’ feet pulled out of their boots and licked the ankles and climbed as far as the khaki seven and a half millimeters thick would allow you should have shaken their belly like a carpet it was grand illusion day when they escape their deep knowledge and pretend to look for handsome successors but it would be better to look for the heart and put an alarm clock in its place that could play reveille like a puppet but wouldn’t serve coffee in bed you should have rummaged under their false teeth to hunt for hidden diamonds with lively fingers hunt for them everywhere not find them even in the creases of their nakedness. Joy of being a child of the sovereign people of lending a hand to institutions and seeing one’s name inscribed on the slate of urinals in letters of coal tar for a single flag that one has become flapping its boredom at the angles of two streets that the wind stirs unless it’s first the wind of trumpets all love to the winds

The yellow line could be seen for as long a time As the highway desired And if you fell asleep at the wheel It fulgurated in the dozing soul Like a brutal revelation That allows you not to feel In the dream’s snapshot Your brain getting smashed Against the milestone or the windshield It was an ideal line Crowned with horizontal blue That unwound day after day Like a clothesline Flags and scalps and washed-out roses Our countries our combats our wars Mingling lassitude with involuntary starts A gymnastic in disorder That sickened our hearts

Adieu near those fields that smoke disembowels And that your arm pushes away For a long time until the inevitable stratum of the Adieus until the next Adieu The door in a cliff has closed. I wanted Daylight to enter here only through the arc-lamp of your eyes That the limits of this place be defined only By the carnal walls our bodies erected Opened wider on the recaptured past than the smallest Pocket-watch and its visible trail ever were Your mouth swallowed the hour and my teeth broke on it When I entered you with kisses Under the full-blown palm of multiple hands The rose you know, on the ground now, Perfumed the silence and killed our secrets Marking our garden with fear that was no longer fear Adieu    the songs are ended    the years disemboweled And may your body distance itself For a long time until the ineluctable regret of Adieus until forever

As long as you believe in miracles You watch the sun fall into the sea Every evening Then you turn your back and sink Among the ferns sparkling from a moon or from the other Night up to your knees under the vault of cries. The pubescent monkeys, the adolescent pumas Contemplate the slender crescent Of the earth In the eyes of a dead viper That knots on the asphalt The alpha of a future alphabet. It’s the end of night the mosquitoes Place themselves on your forehead and die with you In the ruins of your dreams erected By the distant suggestions of cities Where you wish to find an empty Bed to die in. The cathedrals the cinemas the soliloquies The beggar’s ear glued to the violin Music To be lovesick when the songs All temple prostitutes all rotgut for two cents Are going to end up in the pink slit of a jukebox. Hope is under the hand that weak flesh Groped massaged turgescent with eyes shut Comes and goes Let’s keep knotted kisses to ourselves for a long time Until another day erases The trace of each passing.

You let your shirt hang down putting on airs of cuffs at the edge of ending night like the end of a java with double ritournelles or the way the canaries in the cage of still-closed mornings were singing that it mattered little to them that their windows were open the stones the paving stones the door-frames the armatures the window-frames the sheets of the bed clothes in their colors were beating the dawn along with us better drums than your belly better drumsticks than my fingers and the trees and the roofs the river and its bridges the clear distances of the city the factories without smoke bathed as at their birth stammered a trial hello that only ended however in this word round as a doubloon placed on the edge of that day by a considerate friend the sun on your arms naked against my cheeks hello I said to you the day of quatorz’juillet