Evening Poem

By Jean-Pierre Siméon

translated by emily drumsta

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Illustration by M. Taft
Image
In an evening made from the whirling of winds
from the slap of laughter
where the skinny silhouette of a beggar
was chasing itself across the asphalt
where an entire sky of abandon
weighed on the napes of passersby
where light yellow handkerchief
ran in the gutters ah just
like a fallen god calling forth
the fats of the city

in an evening of infinite loneliness

of widowed flesh
searching vainly for heat
in all the fallen black

I waited for you
you, the real life

waited with sleeping eyes
mouth in secret

I waited for you yes
in this place of exasperated emptiness

and every movement
was like the panic at the edge of a ravine
a trap for the soul

and pacing between a step backwards
and a new hope
could there have been any other fear
besides this ultimate
ultimate, this
being the lost moment
of a distant happiness

I waited for you, you the reality
in this nocturnal fiction
where proximity smelled
like dead fire
where the great houses
built from the heaviest the strongest 
of stone
were no more than the flimsy scenery
of a bad dream

there I waited for you
you, the radiant

you, the radiant in the form of a scent
understanding better than breath 
which comes from lack
these things unseen
that bring to the hands
a joyous trembling

but was this waiting
when already the rhythm
when already the rhythm and its sweetness
coming to the step
yes even to the heart of an architecture
of ashes
overtook the evening

no I was not like those
who tap their feet in train stations
setting the time
disinterested
when they should
at the mere thought of crossing
landscapes
have held themselves
in the intensity of prayer
without absence and without regret

you, my real life
you, the lucid
who know how to name the world 
without the barrier of a poem
you who are love itself
because your lip simply understands
the appearance of day at the window
you cannot be absent
and you always ignored
the lukewarm water of regret

this is why in this night
that was like an exegesis of death
as I went
sometimes stumbling on the stone of a shadow
sometimes brushing shoulders with the impoverished light of bars
as I was forming
visions of a strange rite
without the means of sleep
time seemed to me like
an inkwell spilled on the skin of silence

here needing to say like 
since nothing of our senses is skilled in
these kinds of truth

and it is exactly from this emptiness
the step absent from the footprint
that every poem, every melancholy is born
flowers that spring
from a language lost

in this evening I say
made from the whirling of winds
from the nervous boredom of cities
from this lassitude
that the mechanical blinking of signs
seems to signify
and the sudden solidification of trees

in this evening whose hours 
have taken form
aqueous and grey
and poisoned feeling
plumes of the soul dipped in petroleum

I went
no more happy no more sad   
than a hermit in the desert
bent on being no more
than an illusion in the sand

I went to wait for you
you, the other-worldly
patient beyond the possible

you, invited from a place here incomprehensible
since your beauty is a fire
that drives away 
the savage the infantile fear
of shadows

I waited for you
guardian of kisses
true in this moment
to the sweetness
that here was both
the night and the reason

my vow took form
on the insignificant threshold of things

I waited for you
a serious philosopher with his hand
in a bag of pebbles
laughed at by pigeons fat as thoughts
on rooftops

so on the insignificant threshold of things
this wandering vow
like the first sound of language
in the mouth of a child
took form in me
this vow that gnawing on the shadow of streets
feels a sudden voracious hunger
for dawn's flesh

still he takes his sweat and suffering     
the effort of his club-foot
for what they are:
the half-rain of memory like
the ink of words undone
on the wrong side of the blotting paper

still I was as carefree as a kid on a rooftop
and when they crossed my eyes
the beautiful prostitutes the two astonishers
black of spirit and of heart
the grotesque and the morbid
illusion and memory
arm-in-arm as after a party
beneath the impoverished blinking neon lights
I threw them my laughter
I saw nothing but in you the world
I loved nothing but your face
and if life can be read in hands
so I read in your hand
absolutely, distantly
the joy that precedes us

and the ephemeral of a blow
collapsed in the evening

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