Erín Moure

winter water blue melt backlit
life suddenly in thin chemise
steadfast
in questions and old silences

in the puzzle of proper nouns
and barking city: February
slow eyelashes that beckon to love
and spinning tops

foliage of word for word
gentleness that evades meaning
plunge into the dark
with metronome

crabs eels intestines
legs and antennae
destiny you said it
from memory
with a single verb

the thousand and one possibilities of the toe, the foot
the ankle
images in the subway glued to each other
faces pressed against the whys

the saliva the fingernails
it all goes beyond
adverbs and bones

the future the future
naked things design
audacity vertical

a woman in panties
half-spoken surrounded
by syntax and paintings

dark eyebrows
a starlet sings
an amphetamine clenched in her teeth

fire close to dying
at the edge of a forest
kiss that counts

someone standing
before an accident
of cars and fiction

under the eyelid:
time’s measuring tape
dust in equilibrium

peoples and their signatures
their faces more alive
than crabs and pigeons in the shade
of cherry trees

poetry drawn back from daring
fiction if you ask me
hazelnut: image of an old
tomb with a squirrel

a photo repeated that sparks a taste
for pleasure with a grain of salt
on the tongue
a photo repeated
a stack of selves archived

big blue armchairs
their cloth arms worn down
by memory and odours
that intoxicate. Retina,
adjust your thoughts

emergency staircase on a slant
with slow blue flung at the sky
window and woman smiling

the rust the steel, broken panes
of America the colour of graffiti
then in slow motion: tulips appear
spinal cord
strange archives

on the iron rails
of a century the mud
of a day the immensity

Sombre: night flower
or calculated shadow
brief flame: hypothesis

Feinte speak reflection
seen through glasses
all words are ribbons

reading lèvres micro
i know the answer
poems that demand we open
the fire the heart: devour me

palace and ice
parentheses ( duvet )
orange, epidermis
pillowcases
i beg of you: answer

birds pepper-coloured
a flight of silence with clouds
distant. I retrace my steps
touch here a woman’s arm

tiny algae that enter
gastronomy
blue water imbued water
always another beginning

the lemon the martini the olive
all that amuses
then came night with its lampshades
describe the light
touch tomorrow

the immense everyday furled in the iris
a morning
of found orchids

winter water blue melt backlit

life suddenly in thin chemise

steadfast

in questions and old silences

in the puzzle of proper nouns

and barking city: February

slow eyelashes that beckon to love

and spinning tops

foliage of word for word

gentleness that evades meaning

plunge into the dark

with metronome

At sunset, bending out the window

Knowing, sidelong, fields in the avenues

My eyes burn anyhow but I don’t care, I’m still reading

that Book by Erin Mouré.

How she makes me ache! She was a creek’s companion

lost south of St. Clair, a walking prisoner in the city’s freedom.

But the way she saw houses,

And the way she stopped short to look in the avenues,

And gave herself to things, in the same way

You’d gaze at trees,

And lift eyes down Vaughan Road to see where you’re headed,

And notice small crocuses pulse in the ravine.

She never speaks of that ache of sadness,

Never admits it,

Just walks downtown as if in a creek bed catching minnows,

Sad like flowers pressed flat in books

Or plants pressing up green, in yogourt jars …

It’s fears slow and fascinating that enter life each morning at coffee time while she wonders if tomorrow there’ll be war and brusquely as she does each morning slices bread and cheese. It’s gestures of uncontrollable avidity that proliferate in the throng and its worldly febrility, its parquet fever on the trading floor and stage. It’s hesitations, heart cries that crisscross broad avenues full of shade and dust that attract and make us think of our legs and elbows, our knees too when desire bumps and bounces words and feelings upward, it’s simple things with prefixes like cyber or bio that hold thoughts fast, float them a moment till we believe them aquatic and marvellous. It’s certainties that in tiny increments of dust and light are soon mixed with our tears. It’s inexplicable feelings made of small hurts strung over long years and vast horizons, it’s blues ideas that settle in where the happiness of existing threatens to take the breath away or to lodge itself in the throat like an instrument of fervour. It’s glimmers of intoxications impossible to look at for long, thoughts so precise that engage us beyond shade and wind, far beyond crude words, so noisy so terribly close to silence that the world all around seems suddenly engulfed in high seas and continual rustling like the music in our heads that in one stroke of the bow dislodges all that resists torment. It’s underlined passages, fragments of happiness that traverse the body and raise bridges all around because elsewhere and in the wild blue yonder they say there’s euphoria. It’s written down with bruises, abundance of life burst to fullness in a world and its niches of worn paths that lick at the shadow of bones.

It’s names of places, cities, climates that haunt. Characters. Clear mornings, a fine rain that falls all day, rare images from elsewhere and America, two natural disasters that make us close ranks amid corpses, it’s quiet or violet acts, mortars, ice cubes in glasses at cocktail hour, noise of dishes or a slight stutter that momentarily torments, a slap, kiss, it’s names of cities like Venice or Reading, Tongue and Pueblo, names of characters Fabrice Laure or Emma. Words honed over years and novels, words we spoke with halting breath laughing spitting sucking an olive, verbs we add to the pleasure of lips, to success, to sure death. It’s words like cheek or knee and still others further than we can see that leave us teetering on the edge of the abyss, to stretch like cats in morning it’s words that keep us up till dawn or make us flag down a cab on a weekday night when the city’s asleep before midnight and solitude is caught like an abscess in the jaw. It’s words spoken from memory, in envy or pride often words uttered with love while laying our hands behind the head or pouring a glass of port. It’s words whose etymology must be sought, then projected on a wall of sound so the cries of pain and sighs of pleasure that wander in dreams and documents lay siege to the mysterious darkness of the heart. It’s words like bay, hill, wadi, via, rue, stradă, dispersed through the dictionary between flamboyancies and neons, burial mounds and forests. It’s words arms of the sea, ensembles of sense that claw or soft at our chest, cold shivers rivulets and fear abrupt in the back while we try to fissure the smooth time of the future with trenchant quotations. It’s words that swallow fire and life, who knows now if they’re Latin French Italian Sanskrit Mandarin Galician Arab or English, if they conceal a number an animal or old anguishes impatient to shoot up before our very eyes like cloned shadows replete with light and great myths.

I am in the little field of my mother

Her field touches

oaks of the valley

and I touch the faces of my corn

Opening corn’s faces

so that my hands touch its braille letters

The face of corn is all in braille

the corn wrote it

Fires will burn this evening

burn the dry husks of the corn

and I will learn to read

Sheep will wait by the trough

for they know corn’s feature, corn’s humility

corn’s dichten

grain’s

granite too

XXX

Se quiserem que eu tenha um misticismo, está bem, tenho-o.

Sou místico, mas só com o corpo.

A minha almo é simples e não pensa.

O meu misticismo é não quere saber.

É viver e não pensar nisso.

Não sei o que é a Natureza: canto-a.

Vivo no cimo dum outeiro

Numa casa caiada e sozinha,

E essa é a minha definição.

XXX So I’m a Mystic, and Then?

If they accuse me of mysticism, alright, I’m guilty.

I’m a mystic. Now do you feel better?

But it’s only an act of the body.

My soul is simple and doesn’t think at all.

My mysticism is in not wanting to know.

It lives without thinking about living.

I don’t know what Nature is; I just go on about it.

I live where Winnett bends almost double, a little valley,

In a brick house, half a duplex in fact,

built by a man who lost his son at Teruel.

The neighbour beside me throws lasagna to the crows.

There. That’s how you can define me.