At the Locks of the Void

AT THE LOCKS OF THE VOID

In the foreground and in longitudinal flight
a dried-up brook drowsy roller of obsidian pebbles.
In the background a decidedly not calm architecture
of torn down burgs of eroded mountains
on whose glimpsed phantom serpents chariots
a cat’s-eye and alarming constellations are born.
It is a strange firefly cake hurled
into the gray face of time,
a vast scree of shards of ikons of blazons
of lice in the beard of Saturn.
On the right very curiously standing against
the squamous wall of crucified butterfly wings
open in majesty a gigantic bottle whose
very long golden neck drinks a drop of blood
from the clouds. As for me I am no longer thirsty.
It gives me pleasure to think of the world undone
like an old copra mattress like an old voodoo necklace
like the perfume of a felled peccary.
I am no longer thirsty. All heads belong to me.
It is sweet to be gentle as a lamb.
It is sweet to open the great sluicegates of gentleness:

through the shaken sky
through the exploded stars
through the tutelary silence
from very far beyond myself I come toward you
woman sprung from a beautiful laburnum
and your eyes wounds barely closing
on your modesty at having been born

It is I who sings with a voice still caught up
in the babbling of elements.
It is sweet to be a piece of wood a cork
a drop of water in the torrential flood of the end
and of the new beginning. It is sweet to doze off
in the shattered heart of things.
I no longer have any sort of thirst.
My sword made from a shark’s-tooth smile
is becoming terribly useless.
My mace is very obviously out of season
and out of play. Rain is falling.
It is a crisscross of rubble,
it is a skein of steel for reinforced concrete,
it is an incredible stowage of the invisible
by first-rate ties, it is a branchwork of syphilis,
it is the diagram of a brandy bender,
it is the graphic representation of a seismic floodtide,
it is a conspiracy of dodders,
it is the nightmare’s head impaled on the lance point
of a mob mad for peace and for bread.

I advance to the region of blue lakes.
I advance to the region of sulphur springs.
I advance to my crateriform mouth toward which
have I struggled enough? What have I to discard?
Everything by god everything.
I am stark naked. I have discarded everything.
My genealogy. My widow. My companions.
I await the boiling, I await the baptism of sperm.
I await the wingbeat of the great seminal albatross
supposed to make a new man of me.
I await the immense tap, the vertiginous slap
that will consecrate me as a knight of a plutonian order.
I await in the depths of my pores
the sacred intrusion of benediction.

And suddenly it is the outpouring of great rivers
it is the friendship of toucans’ eyes
it is the fulminating erection of virgin mountains
I am pregnant with my despair in my arms
I am pregnant with my hunger in my arms
and my disgust in my mouth I am invested.
Europe patrols my veins like a pack of filariae
at the stroke of midnight.
To think that their philosophies tried to
provide them with morals.
That ferocious race won’t have put up with it.

Europe pig iron fragment
Europe low tunnel oozing a bloody dew
Europe old bag Europe
Europe old dog Europe worm-drawn coach
Europe peeling tattoo
Europe your name is a raucous clucking
and a muffled shock

I unfold my handkerchief it is a flag
I have donned my beautiful skin
I have adjusted my beautiful clawed paws

Europe
I hereby join all that powders the sky
with its insolence
all that is loyal and fraternal
all that has the courage to be eternally new
all that knows how to yield its heart to the fire
all that has the strength to emerge from
an inexhaustible sap
all that is calm and self-assured
all that is not you
Europe
eminent name of the turd


Aime Cesaire

Translation from French by Clayton Eshleman & A. James Arnold
Posted over on Jerome Rothenberg's site Poems & Poetics