It's wonderful
Not to know where things come from
Hidden sequences
Are finer
There are intrigues
In the midst of which you forget
The beginning, no longer anticipate the end
For another moment or so
Everything is penetrable.
It begins like that, in the middle
Of a conversation: the market has already blossomed
In the burning hot square
The budding phase
And to call this town
Venice it was necessary to camouflage
The infrastructure, to place
Forks knowingly
Spillikins over the orchestra pit.
The merchandise brought in
By convoys without headlights
Silently at night
Rivals nature.
Give us our money back! Yet it's wonderful
Not to know where things come from
Not even children and when ethnologists
Pose as missionaries
Of family planning
To laugh with the savages.
Hidden sequences
Are finer. If you grasp them, lift them
By the neck like poisonous
Snakes, sticks
Entwined, many sentences
Are compatible. Their jaws
Open so wide beneath the pressure of your fingers
If necessary, another tube
Slots in and all the plumbing
Gets going with liquid joints.
What is it that gives this morning
With its well-punctuated accidents
Of the market, the café, the return to the dark-room
The cohesion of a film? Not the music
Stuck on top, redundant, the shame
Of cinema. No, a prosody, improvised
Perhaps which doubles back
On itself nonchalantly. Impossible to tear it away
From its pretext, it will pollute
The air, the film alone remaining
On walls and skin. Molded brass:
A link between two movements
Hidden between two currents. That's how
It begins, when the journey's underway. That's pretty much
What I mean. - But it makes no sense
My poor friend. - Fine. There are intrigues
In the midst of which you forget
The beginning, no longer anticipate the end: gangsters on the run
Place themselves like paper sumo wrestlers
On a cardboard platform but it's just a circle
Traced in the sand on the beach. So
Their associates beat the ground with the flats of their hands:
They fall still rigid, the reel turns faster
The spectators tremble in their seats
Until one of them crosses
The line. Fine art. What could you do
Today that would be better than to raise
The miniature to the real size of the game?
Miniscule fragments stretch themselves out
The breakdown vehicle here to save us is held together with rubber bands.
That happened for no reason at all
On our journey
Towards death. The tardy explorer
In mid descent of the Orinoco or the Amazon
Develops a fever, paralysed he watches the sliding
Of an interminable snake, the mouth seems
As distant as the source. Or
Sitting in the middle of a tree trunk, look
He remarks that it's a crocodile.
Such things happen in life: halfway through
In the ambiguous zone where for another moment or so
Everything remains amorphous, penetrable - or so you would like to believe.
Anonymous well-wishers make sure ends meet
Fill the stalls' empty boxes but we must
Hope that when night comes the dildos will adapt
To the universal harness. That's how
It begins, that's how
I understand it provided that no conductor
Decides to tap the rostrum with his stick
And that no date is fixed.

Translation: 2012, Kate Campbell