ROGER GILBERT-LECOMTE: BLACK MIRROR - LIFE LOVE DEATH THE VOID AND THE WIND

 

The Borders of Love

 

 

Between two mouths in a kiss

Windowglass of solitude

Selection from Black Mirror: The Selected Poems of Roger Gilbert-lecomte, translated from the French by David Rattray, published by Station Hill Press, 1991. All rights reserved.

 

Testament

 

 

I come from afar

in the marches of night

Much farther than one might imagine

My story is slight in the city of light

Well known in the deserts of famine

With her teeth and her nails she’s everywhere

I let her mangle me

But her eyes say I’m a piece of slime

And she will strangle me

And if my berth tonight I choose

In the havens of misery since

I never knew how to refuse

Misery’s blandishments

To the bottom of the heap I slide

With neither pisspot nor candle

But oblivion’s obscene solicitudes

To me alone a lovely

scandal 

 

 

Into the Eyes of Night

 

 

 

 

 

A woman dozes on a roof her name is night

 

Ancient abandoned to the perils of intoxication

 

To sleep’s fumbling treasons

 

Dreamer in an avalanche of slips

 

Ditched on a high glassy place to eyeball outer space

 

Over the corroded zinc where old man sun the killer

 

And his old lady that tearful poisoner the moon tend bar

 

Our big sleepwalker’s nails screech all at once

 

Her fingers sprout insanely squealing diamonds

 

Drops of blood singing in midair

 

Dance like beads of mercury

 

Up to this woman curled in the monster’s lap of nothingness

 

A chimney fumes a cloud in tatters

 

In sooty black silk the night wind

 

Pitches a nomad tent

 

Lining heaven a celestial floater

 

In the sleeper’s huge adoring

 

Eyes their lids stirring as

 

Long long lashes flutter and

 

Shrinking stars explode

 

The name is night she sleeps with one eye open

 

And all the world at stake on what she does

 

 

The Perpetual Incantation

 

 

 

 

 

That awful mask a snapshot

 

Amazed solitude

 

Transfixes on the surface

 

Of a perennial torrent flesh

 

Casual flesh

 

The awful mask a mugshot

 

Of drugged solitude

 

Your face

 

May the rainburst erase it replace it

 

With a vacuity that shines

 

A dazzle of nonentity a

 

Sightless clairvoyant of white shadows

 

One forever eaten by wind

 

 

The Four Elements

 

To Rolland de Reneville

 

 

 

 

 

If I say Fire I am ringed in flames

 

When I say Water Ocean expires at

 

My feet an empty hull floating in solid

 

Crystal a mummy on ice is Air

 

In Earth the castaway takes root sleeping

 

Under the leafy tree of his own body

 

The dream’s golden branch shoots out his mouth

 

A dirt-caked mouth exhaling to the sky

 

From lungs inside out like booming treetops

 

Red harvest in the mortal midnight sun

 

 

I Want to be Damned

 

Or

 

Where the Prophet Stopped

 

To Claude Sernet

 

 

 

 

 

You’re wrong

 

I’m not the one that went up I’m

 

Still the other guy the man no man looks for

 

My face behind the red mask glory shame

 

Faces the wind wind is my only guide

 

I’ll stand there like a statue even as

 

Some crazy gust knocks down a ruined house

 

Leaving me upright forget about night

 

What do you want of me the only one

 

Standing yet cold numb restless not all there

 

To reach the persons long dead go for the crack Black light from the other sun filters through

 

And if ere evening I happen to fall

 

Flat on my face in the road arms outstretched

 

A jolt of the old juice my ultimate

 

Will bring me to my feet for the defeat

 

Night will hasten as I howl in a voice like

 

Great waters growling in the vault of night

 

Until the coming of that sign that hour

 

Leave me alone go on deny a prophet’s

 

Power to turn life inside out transmuting

 

All sense to an immortal flash of pain

 

Leave me to the horrors inside my empty

 

Head and they are damning damned damned damning.

 

 

Coronation and Massacre of Love

 

 

 

I

 

 

 

To the pale east in the agony of ether

 

To the west in the night of great waters

 

To the septentrion in back of the north wind

 

To the south blest by the ashes of the dead

 

To the four animal faces of the cardinal points

 

To the face of the bull

 

To the lion’s face

 

To the eagle’s face

 

To the forever unfinished and ever agonized

 

Human face.

 

At the heart of a dove

 

In a snake’s coil

 

From the honey of heaven to the salt of the ocean sea

 

Of the icons meaning femal space only one lives

 

It is a woman’s body made up of stars

 

A shape and vessel holding universe

 

A blue skinned body formed like the sky

 

 

 

II

 

 

 

A home to ghosts and to the children of night

 

A place of absence stillness gloom

 

The whole of space and what it holds

 

In a field all white a black hole

 

Like the cave of the sky

 

The whole body of woman is a vacuum to be filled

 

 

 

III

 

 

 

In a cloak of pale shadow

 

Cold dawn

 

Floods sky and living flesh

 

From pole to pole

 

From the occult currents common to flesh and stars

 

To the bottom of each earthy body

 

Earthquake

 

And fault through which a volcano of madness

 

Roars

 

Nail that screaming woman

 

To the tripod

 

Her mouth consumed

 

In the flaming

 

Glory of the bitter laurel

 

Foams

 

Like a raging sea

 

Her hair is a

 

Hurricane

 

Her eyes an eclipse

 

Stars are streaming out of her fingertips

 

Her tragic flesh draped in a silk of tremors

 

Her face carved in the marble of fright

 

Her feet the sun and moon

 

She strides along like an ocean

 

Rolling her hips

 

In a long ample pulsing swell

 

 

 

Her body embodying the night

 

Black flame the double mystery

 

Of an inverse identity

 

Shimmering in the mirror of great waters

 

 

 

IV

 

 

 

In the desert of love a glimmering visitation

 

Blind prophetess your eye has the clarity of cut glass

 

Let the ear of your heart

 

Hear the lion growl

 

WithinVeiled in a red fog and buzz

 

Of blood seared by the venomous spells

 

And prestigia of desire

 

Exciting in the bend of your nocturnal throat

 

The voracity of vampires

 

Vast dance of nuptial gravitations whole

 

Worlds and seas pulsing

 

To the heartbeat of a weeping sun

 

Down into the temple lost in the forgotten deep

 

Down into the medusa hole that first spawned

 

A panic shadow on the first night of the creation

 

Hear the trumpet blast and the scattered seed

 

Blasting all the way to bedrock at the bottom of the deepest cave

 

She dances to connect night and mother sea

 

A plant connecting earth and blood of heaven

 

 

 

V

 

 

 

As Antaeus revives by touching earth

 

To revive empty space by touching skins

 

In your bosom I lie in order to perform the rite

 

Of homecoming to where I came from when not yet born

 

The animal sign of the archaic ecstasy

 

 

 

In your bosom I lay the offering

 

Of balm and venom mixed

 

Blind as I am

 

In the caves of being that are the antechambers of annihilation

 

 

 

VI

 

 

 

Yet who could peel the mask off your face

 

And the skin’s opaque frontier

 

To reach the quivering fulcrum of the self That point at dead center of the eye

 

Of an endlessly expanding series of rings

 

Itself perfectly motionless at the bottom of the heart star of the absolute

 

Empty point foundation of all life and of the forms

 

Which according to the circle of torments

 

Become the secret of blind change

 

Whence the desperation

 

Of a love canceled in a double absence

 

At the thunderstruck peak of delirium

 

An act of androgynous unity

 

The man had forgotten forever already

 

Before the universe had even begun to exist

 

Before hemorrhage

 

Before head

 

 

 

VII

 

 

 

In the Tibetan story

 

Lost in chaos unkempt and

 

Darkness like a

 

Mouthful of dirt

 

A dead person’s fatless shade

 

Whirls in black oblivion shivering

 

 

 

For the icy slithering of ghosts is all there is out there

 

When suddenly it finds itself Drawn to a distant glimmer then

 

Looking into an enchanted cave

 

A light-filled paradise of warm jewels

 

A little kingdom of splendors and beatitudes

 

In the region known as essence of desire

 

Which though never sated is forever satisfied

 

Lured by the exhilarating smell

 

The shadeEnters

 

And sleeps

 

Only to awake riveted

 

Rooted in uterus

 

A ghastly fetus doomed to one more round

 

Of procreative desperation

 

Spinning on the wheel of the horror of existence

 

All the way back from the eldest fetal ancestor

 

To the putrid mother of us all

 

Our first ancestor rot

 

In her robber of foxfire

 

The demented queen

 

Who makes and unmakes

 

Forms and fortunes

 

And by committing the eternal feminine

 

Star-studded bones and all

 

To the honor of ash

 

Imposes on skin’s

 

Statuesque and pride inclination

 

Water’s dread horizontality