I'm about in the middle here and I wanted to interrupt myself
to read two translations, about which the first important thing
to know is that I am only--
whatever credit accrues to the translators,
there are two of us, and only half of it is mine.
An excellent young translator named
Mary Feeney worked on these translations with me.
They're from the prose poems of Jean Follain.
I have two to read to you.
There are any number of favorites,
but I want to read them here because, in some way,
I associate them with Tucson.
And Michael Cuddihy's Ironwood was the first magazine,
and he was the first editor, to pay attention
to our translations.
And the book of them, long-delayed
because this project has taken a total of about ten years work,
will appear in the spring from Grilled Flowers Press, also
of Tucson.
So I somehow feel that there's been a home for them
here, though they've also been on the road
for ten years looking for a home, too.
Two of them, these first poems are all untitled.
And I'm reading two from a series called Objet, where
he usually begins by looking at something very closely
and then imagining, as he looks more and more closely at it,
what kind of emotional life might
have been lived around that thing, around that object.
"Let the schoolboy pull a marble out of his pocket,
the soldier an old familiar knife,
the schoolmaster a huge colored handkerchief.
And it might happen, that for a brief instant, such objects,
humble as they are, seem priceless.
A whole world rich in anniversaries
is revealed when an older woman takes out, from beneath stacks
of linen in a large closet, a baptismal box containing
first communion pictures with their golden chalices
and red and blue savior.
In a spare moment, she opens this precious box only
to close it after a short, silent contemplation,
since of course the clock is always striking.
Time to sweep.
Time to sew.
Time, too, for feeding the animals,
who complain when they get no fodder,
mash, or bloody scraps."
The second of these.
"Women dishwashers would be babbling on.
You could hear glasses and bowls colliding.
Through unflinching window panes,
you could see a large storehouse containing several wheels.
One from a tricycle, another from a child's stroller,
for so long, with such ceremony, pushed beneath the sycamores.
Sometimes the women would stop.
Still holding porcelain plates in their hands,
they'd tilt their heads, squinting a little,
trying to remember a forgotten name or date.
At their feet, the cat licked milk from a saucer.
The future was nonetheless full of hideous landscapes.
Bloody barracks, bitten by the wind, stupor in freight cars
with barred doors.
For the time being it was unheard of.
There was the neatness of table settings
and shining kitchen utensils touching the softened
skin of the dishwashers, those women who,
in a couple of hours, would say, it's getting dark.
Let's turn the lights on.
You can't see a thing in here."