BY MARIE DE QUATREBARBES / OCTOBER 2019

POETRY

Original poem in French - Translated by the Wedgie editors.

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Alejandra

          For Alejandra Pizarnik, Argentine poet (1936-1972).

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Dance, you loner

pull the pig’s tail

of things colourful

a small pungent rose

blind lamp

emaciated bat

cremation of pink lisping weather 

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In startled culottes

that lick crown bite

the silver paper

and there: the lilac flower

a giant alphabet

the wind, the accomplice

Surviving

with a stick of pink chalk

on a bed of dry leaves

a puppy’s skull

outliving the living

in a stick of chalk 

the microbial adventure

an ant on your foot

Girl say something

say spill your blood

on the black rocks

the red is alive

and has survived the wounds

open in the blood

Open the yellow notebook

tell us about a Russian forest

and the snowmen

brought here in order to please

at this stage she concedes

ice under the knife

the pond full of fish

in the depths of reason

Buried under the ice 

in the place where the tree stands

measure amongst foliage

the weight of the tree rooted

like a clematis of yellow times

carved in the tree 

Turn your sail

under the land site of an idea

the tunnel is in song

in the garden in the evening

in her turns the sail

circles round in your weakness

made for crying

whilst spinning an idea 

And the enormous wasps

concealing under the arcades 

of astonishment and death

foreign to the idea

of sky embryos

poplars under the sail

A page wrapped 

in global instruction

moves eye to water

the triangulate garden

orange blossom

saturated in the bees

grasping under the waist 

like fragment of yellow times

The premises are sowed 

lost in the zone

light in the open air

of corolla in bleach

color the same zone

by the open squares.

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