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From Teint
From Teint
Not black ribbon but white
silences deserted
streets a bleached dust under
August moon cool ermine
traced with silver thread
shivers under scraped skins
say snow of leather or
city drowned in feathers
you can't get far enough away
to see the glacial picturesque
without the ripped hide
stench and bloodstains
seeping into utterance
between the river and itself
Not a thread but a gut
strung along arondissements
where the feeling is
microbial love that passes
understanding in our
blue gentian candida
streptococcus waterlily
phage from everywhere at once
why this is Paris in the
weather repeating itself
nor are we out of it
nor am I out of you
from secret to secretion
as water undoes us
Not a vein but the lateral
piercing of boulevard
Auguste Blanqui driven
underground it has become
its own double the universe
yammering on while
far away the brother
stars look back at us
tangling and untangling
the endless alternatives
of self by side by self
where revolution runs
into hidden patterns
a cracked face a future
La nature ne connaît ni ne pratique la morale en action. Ce qu'elle fait, elle ne le fait pas exprès. Elle travaille à colinmaillard, détruit, crée, transforme. Le reste ne la regarde pas. Les yeux fermés, elle applique le calcul des probabilités mieux que tous les mathématiciens ne l'expliquent, les yeux très ouverts. Pas une variante ne l'esquive, pas une chance ne demeure au fond de l'urne. Elle tire tous les numéros.
Nature neither knows nor practises morality in action. What she does, she does accidentally. She plays at blind man's bluff, destroys, creates, transforms. The rest don't notice her. With eyes shut, she applies the calculation of probabilities better than all the mathematicians can explain with their eyes wide open. Not a variant escapes her, not a chance is left at the bottom of the ballot-box. She draws all the numbers.
Auguste Blanqui, L'éternité par les astres (1872) - translation by Zoë Skoulding
Zoë Skoulding's fourth and most recent collection of poetry is The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (Seren, 2013). She is also the author of the monograph Contemporary Women's Poetry and Urban Space: Experimental Cities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and the translator of In Reality: Selected Poems by the francophone poet Jean Portante (Seren, 2013). Based on research into the Bièvre, a lost river in Paris, the poems published here are part of a sequence written during a 2014 residency at Les Récollets hosted jointly by the Institut Français and the Mairie de Paris.
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