Anne-Marie Albiach,
1937-2012
My
book is the fall of a body, you said. Yours, fragile, premeditated. Into the
depth of the page, where mysteries might still speak. And time passes with
infinite resources of slowness and is its own project of erasure.
Arrived
none too late, you wrote, scar-tissued darkness, form as opposed to character,
point, knife, displace the menace.
Headlong
your rush, thoughts, desires in violent agitation, a heatwave. Then grounded,
the flying carpet, prey to grammatical elements, fire sustained by adverbs and
conjunctions. Intensity within the darkest howl of pain. Your horizontal
position did not project nocturnal ease onto the day.
Can't
without sensuality, you wrote, pedigree of thirst, desire of words for one
another, vertigo, speed of chance,
pure pulse free of cause.
Time
has fallen into the hands of mathematicians, and clocks pretend to be
synchronized. Hence your words in geometries across the gravitational fields
and spilled metaphor. To give birth to an order of a different kind. Where even
fallen among the nakedness of letters you might remain a subject. With clothes
marking the boundaries of body by surrounding it and stimulating respiration.
Those
women, you wrote, the lyricism of precision, dazzled by data, the wrist,
upwrench, the splendor of syntax, complicit to the point of injury, they will
come no more.
Though
you opened all your senses to encounter you could not decipher the vast
hostility of the real. In the mirror large eyes, but not yourself. You fled,
hoping for ecstasy and full harmony with death. Then hesitated on the threshold
to gauge the distance from body to text. This mystery, never fully resolved,
has devoured you.
Uncertain
dream, you wrote, the body as text, irrepoachable absence, the scent of the
rose, invisible from lack of self, song blazing incantescence, hair swept into
the night.
Rosmarie Waldrop’s most recent books
are Gap Gardening: Selected Poems, Driven to Abstraction, and Curves
to the Apple (New Directions). Her collected essays, Dissonance (if youare interested), is available from University of Alabama Press. Her novel, The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter, has been reissued by Dorothy a Publishing
Project. She has translated from the French 14 volumes of Edmond Jabès’s work
(see her memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès,
Wesleyan UP) as well as volumes by Emmanuel Hocquard, Jacques Roubaud, and,
from the German, Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, Gerhard Rühm, Ulf Stolterfoht,
Peter Waterhouse.
She
lives in Providence, RI where, with Keith Waldrop, she edited Burning Deck
Press.
Photo
credit: Roberta Kaufman
