Lise Gaboury-Diallo : Three poems from Petites déviations, translated by Jérôme Melançon and revised by the author

 

 

 

artifices

cormorants rain into the estuary
engage in unfair competition
with the forecast rain
they hurry
begin diving
falling bill first
hooking the careless silvery
bait under the brackish water

elsewhere the inherent drought
of the region
smears the plain with canicular heat
but here giant pelicans
end their wandering
hit the water like pounding rain
in a semblance of silence
that hums in the distance

as the zealot birds
slice through dreariness
gorge themselves with life
I meditate

as they draw
their loopy arabesques
I enter into slowness
eyes open

I seek the prayer
and the relinquishment found in absence
let us pray for the loss of artifices
let us pray for these experiences of beauty
fulfilled
I pray so that I might ascend time
and fly over the flat clouds
avoiding from on high this vertigo
of errors committed in torrents
even my own
exact copies
of those of others
our artifices move ahead blindly
fall like raindrops and birds
towards the void
towards the unknown

 

feints

I measure us against
the periphery
of our pretention
me and my ghost
with a hint of implausibility
she my unknown twin bleeds
her life through my pores
stains my shirts
my shoes 

I navigate us
within the limit
of the woven intimacy
of silken shadow and light
invaluable per square meter
and which my soul wears
you have to know we are alike
confined as we are in this crazy tower
of skin and bones 

I gnaw at us
we the flawed like chatty introverts
who abruptly disappear we talk to our self
we lessen the distance
between all the grave pains
and gangly joys between life and after
this wobbly proximity
threatened as if
by an outbreak of the plague
I bring us into crisis
into temptation
I want to erase the references
review the outcome
what remains is impossible immortality
an inevitable dialogue
pitting body against heart
with wild feints
etched there in the post-scriptums
of my scuffles 

I invent my scandalous small incidents
to dodge you always
up until the end 

 

static load

our alternative modes of
communication switched off
archived
a fluttering of eyelids
a blinking
not hard to decode
as of now obsolete
this astrology of omens
that animated us
and they are only used for daydreaming
these guide stars
lost electric sparks 

our past
having become a static load
around which gravitate
the negative flurries
of longing
we could do without

our bodies from our head
pull away it seems
our reason no longer thinks
about us
our alkaline power fades away
we are almost
extinguished

 

Jérôme Melançon also reviewed and introduced the collection where these poems can be found, petites déviations.

 

 

 

 

Lise Gaboury-Diallo is Professor of language and literature at the Département d’études françaises, de langues et de littératures at the Université de Saint–Boniface, where she has been teaching courses in literature and creative writing for many years. She has published in a variety of genres – from literary criticism to essay, in addition to prose, poetry, and theatre – and has received many prizes and distinctions (2004: First prize in Radio-Canada/CBC’s French-language Poetry Prize for Homestead; 2009: Prix littéraire Rue Deschambault for L’endroit et l’envers; 2010: Finalist for the Émile-Olllivier prize for Lointaines; 2011: Prix littéraire Rue Deschambault for Lointaines, and finalist in Radio-Canada’s Readers Prize for Lointaines and for Les enfants de Tantale). She has published nine books of poetry, including six with the Éditions du Blé (Manitoba), one with Éditions de la Nouvelle Plume (Saskatchewan), one with Presses Universitaires de Saint-Boniface and one in the Poètes des cinq continents collection with Éditions de l’Harmattan (France). Her two collections of short stories, Lointaines (2010) and Les enfants de Tantale (2011), like her most recent poetry collection, were published with Éditions du Blé. She is currently working on a third collection of short stories and on a play.

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His most recent chapbook is with above/ground press, Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022, after 2020’s Coup), and his most recent poetry collection is En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on Twitter mostly, and sometimes on Instagram, both at @lethejerome.