from The Vitals
(translated from the French by Aiden Farrell)
September 1
September 2
We don’t trick her. And if she falls, we entrust her to the bees. Head forward, horns, bust. An elegance pageant. Figure of speech: circumstances. Everything is free here. Subtlety comes from the word. A fiction advances: the afternoon, the children…fiction to which we can only respond with a nod when a vague idea, a very vague idea, vaporous even, comes to snatch it away. She turns. Her head, always, in the direction of the wind.
September 3
What is eaten: the vitals. The face as such, the end of the year. Empty swamps, their water brackish, irreducibly yellow. When I say “we” (apples)—the little lame duck, the one we put in the child’s pocket—I mean “he” saves himself (it isn’t him). A sort of ecstasy, delusion of ownership—the reflection on an eye grows in the magnifying glass—loss of the image. Code: passing from green to landscape. Variant: she’s that old boy with the blue mouth.
September 4
Flat mouth (option to withdraw). Heard with mouth: porous. In the implementation of wind: window—its soaked nod. Focal: reclusion-adoration. The frozen function of a use.
September 5
This void: my skin illustrated it. We believe we are born, they say, from swarms of bodies, abstract nudities held in compromised steadiness. They call it: dreams. And we caress them. Our hands reach for their eyes. It’s how we treat things (they are not things). The rupture is often cold, this one, the same scream.
September 6
Yesterday a cloud descended on the city. My window turned the world into a thin surface and I wondered: where are the beds? I’m covered in an onion’s outermost skin. My mouth in situ: narrative acceleration. We find time in the same place we left it—in the pots of crayfish. Inside, tonight, the library burned down and the books were devoured by flames. Say again: are mourners ever singular?
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