At the workshop, I gave Zoe six poems, which were not part of the set of fourteen poems circulated among the group. These are distinctly different and I wanted to share Zoe’s translations of them here.
____
Place your cheek on the mountain
Listen to the cloud
Water will do for your hair
Your chin in the valley
don’t panic your house
Under reassembled shreds
you’ll sleep
at last
_____
Wait
Space enters by your right ear
You have your eye and the paddle
Wait
The rainbow discovers its balance on the tip of your nose
____
Snatched breath
search for honey or the centre of the strange pillar
clutch at lashes believe that you could still smooth the wind
Above all you’d like
to cross the expanding grey
In the ears like what can’t be said
To set off on the clouds or on the sea
without knowing anything
find routes
without self-betrayal
To have waves as children
____
SHE AS AN EIGHT
Breathe in colour with open arms
Your dance is already preparing itself
A shell balanced on one hip
Clown red at your shoulder
Sky in your hair
The ground lifts
You’re ready
and you laugh
____
Between thunderstorms
in the hollow of the copper ocean that frees my feet
I shout
____
FOLDED BETWEEN EMBERS
in the eternity folded between embers
without trembling and without looking to the distance
What is this world that speaks nothing but darkness
Black spring
Harm to space a butterfly
What demented bird cries in the ground ?
To answers give questions
_____
INK POWDER
In silence the secret
presses on the eardrum
narrowed to a buzz
traced braided deep-rooted
It errs between the teeth
crunching around the ruins of words
digs itself in
hidden
In the dust
the unthinkable
the secret resists
The ink points
particles of the secret
She who knows
is buried
the weight in the walls of the head
On the sharp unbreathable ridge
stay roped down
The secret
-complex jump-
this shout
____
The shadow flat and neutral
always adhering to the real
urgent murmurs
You want you doubt
What has fallen silent ?
____
Gather the corners of the table-cloth
Don’t stare
The smoke isn’t certain enough
The ground mislays what it doesn’t understand
Send your fingers into the water
It carries them towards the light
____
am still rolling it around in my head. beautiful and excellent translations too.