THE POEM BOOK

ÉDOUARD GLISSANT (x2), & OCTAVIO PAZ
*****************************************************

ÉDOUARD GLISSANT
Cold Weather Fever

Ashes canebrakes oh your days
By eternity are foresaken
And like fancy dress our lies
Are tears mirrored into life

Shallow mirror and high tower
Death-water no ocean can confine
Beyond the digging hoe the plow
The fever and the furrowed clay

Weep that my space may bind
Space more complete upon you
Than any ocean makes an exile

My fevers furrow canebrake dead
And ash again for all such lies
More than eternity are clay.


ÉDOUARD GLISSANT
Promenade of Solitary Death

The sad boy has not moved
On a lake of roses, strewn
With pale bodies in the rosebushes
Funereal bay it has remained

The shore hesitates the sea passes
The boars are water scourers
Black is the sand, the color
Is evident in this place

The birds here cloak the murky sky
with the gray of their takeoffs
Such evidence has rendered mad
The first wave run aground

Waves from madness to madness
Pale and wan the others have followed
The rosebushes have kept the alms
Of suicides upon their surplice

The white race of frigate birds
Never comes to this repasts
They go to sound other death knells
Where the wind wears no gloves

Here there move only the flutter
Of memory and this high cry
That was heard one August noon
On the cliff and its flock

A cry of earth that deploys
The nervures of its foliage
Because love shall have searched it
Or because the rain is pleasing

A cry of woman torn open
At the edge of the fallows
Her nubile breasts divided
Between misery and moss

Cry of deadbolt and cry of osprey
And the people was asleep
The bird of prey makes its nest
Upon the living ash of the tree

And there still loves only milk
Of seaweeds this smell,
Death vivifies death
Funereal bay it has remained

But sad it has not moved
Upon its lake of hatreds, strewn
With pale bodies in the thickets
Who pardon you, O rosebushes.

__________ 

TPB's notes: translated by Jeff Humphries with Melissa Manolas in: The Collected Poems of Edouard Glissant, University of Minnesota Press 2005

__________________

OCTAVIO PAZ
Concert in the Garden

It rained.
The hour is an enormous eye.
Inside it, we come and go like reflections.
The river of music
enters my blood.
If I say body, it answers wind.
If I say earth, it answers where?

The world, a double blossom, opens:
sadness of having come,
joy of being here.

I walk lost in my own centre.

________ 

TPB's notes: octavio paz has a good translation of a poem by góngora (which we are unable to find)