Nicole Brossard

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

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.