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POETRY Sergio Contardi Heather Dohollau A Grave for W.B. "Once assured of the final disaster then and only then everything went well for him as in a dream." Walter Benjamin Like a birth somewhere else Is the absence of all trace On this shelf above the sea Where the distance opens Through a cross of pathways In the near sky And a bird goes from here To the invisible Without breaking the thread Of time's trembling The present in this garden Is the possible place Of memory's sun A bowl held above the waves Where shine tears That have been wiped away The sun's black writing on the sea Dazzles the words And the stalking angel Leans over the waters Tending the book's Bitter-sweet pages (Paul Klee) Driven back by the wind that blows from the garden The Angelus Novus retreats over the hills His love stretched out in a rainbow of pain Above the ephemera heaped up in the dust Until the last day when the wind falls to its knees And Paradise once more is named among the trees Whose leaves now redeem the many tongues of earth And perfumes are restored to the long gaze of flowers (Hercules Seghers) Climbing up and down among the greyish folds Of a remembered road-rocks breaking into air Where a man has only his head above the star That turns under him-the head in which he walks His life an enclosed place-the gaps are for the sky Earth upside down with waters above dry valleys The exaltation of an earlier country And the man goes among the petrified forms Hoping to find in spite of the frontier's closing At the road's edge-some forgotten flowers A prayer for things Traversing transparent hands With edge intact And a curve so perfect That the body hollows into breath They make ready where we are no longer The angels of return (Albrecht Dürer) A winged woman who seems to see unseeing In the moonlight, there where the tide is high A boat that waits under the still rainbow The falling star that designates her life Her tired hand no longer shapes the world Posed on her brow the sharp freshness of leaves The far away is sheltered by a sphere And night has dressed her writing in the foam Heather Dohollau Translated from the French by the author Les portes d'en bas Editions Folle Avoine, 1992 Beatrice Diotima Hélène These women loved as if dead Who while still living Let their lovers Embark in their absence To touch a new shore And through an imagined loss Be born again From a measure of pain Going beyond As children who have thrown a ball in the air Advance holding out their hands Translated from the French by the author In: L'adret du jour Editions Folle Avoine, 1989 |
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