Poems by Seyhmus Dagtekin
|
PORTRAIT If I became big, I would also grow trees buildings, cars, orbits beakers, eggs I would grow the eyes of others so that they could see me big I would crush bones in the waters of reptiles and would put them in an egg with no shell that I would swallow to become even bigger in your eyes go beyond them tie every day the end of my sentence with a new lace near a tree at the foot of a dog that has passed away and fall into a visage with no face Ad nausea packs of animals will break through your skin Translated by Donald Winkler BARELY A THREAD ON THE LIPS About which death am I going to speak for three pages, a hundred pages One hundred and fifty ages Having come to the maturity of a lunar year But no, it isn't this that passes Passes through our heads That smashes us Not this, not this numbed love Every day a new language bears down on my heart where blood flows as in so many rumps within easy reach / Language moves off like a pocket that empties Isaline stays where she is with the same shadows Palm trees in triangle, fireman in figurine Flowers for any season, yes, yes, any season A fly, an ant And not even a single van But fires, yes, of all shades I turn on the ignition Signal a turn Honk the horn – It is nice the hat you swallow with your saliva Far off, the murmuring of birds, roads, wind, household noises, leaves unmoving under the sun The white of the eye and a fly spinning round on my head The lost run of dogs in the barking of things Exiting lairs Coming home in gunpowder Picking one’s grey matter out of the dust In the hidden heart of things Lower your head and raise it no more. Run till there’s no more running, or feet, or road, or mud, or dust. Till you can no longer stand. Till there’s nothing left to place end to end. Till you’re gone from the beginning and the end But then run, but then gnaw at your bawling Like a lost key That’s missed the step and dropped into a space Two steps down Brimful of sand and mud Chew on the right, drink on the left Who will pass by Who will stop in this passage Present and absent at once At the same time there At the same time The gaze locked in the transience of what’s there In the closed world of sight It’s enough for us not to be in the same place at the same time To rub ourselves up against this heart Each in one’s place With the winds you can raise In an hour and a half You can, you can’t You run on, but you don't rage Everyone’s nibbling at the end of something An unearthed look, an absent poem This stroke chased by that stroke Just like joy, just like sadness In the palm of a girl in the unfurling of the day In other words to reach the void you must pass through flesh and raise no alarms Hanging by the end of a thread Whose opposite end is in empty space I thought I had, I thought I knew To come back and to wind things up To come back wound up To a fault Words in their awkward saddles no more dogs frozen in the now blown and sculpted in my image again a swimmer in the today pricking these cherries at their ends and introduce Venus inevitably into the field of my well-reasoned battles sites more and more scattered wide like remembrances punctured with lakes words seeking refuge in my bodies side by side with their colors their confounding coughs Flesh touching flesh, which allows for the rebound Simple and neat As a snake in the skin / Near this aged wood that with my own hands I put into this cubbyhole – Stay little man; stay little in your place But what’s there within These novelistic airs Nothing awatch, nothing worthwhile In this loving and to love Happy who like Ulysses Machete with no match To scratch the unseen behind your neck That’s it, I told myself, love, it’s that to seek out the other in the scraps father blowing on embers and cats for the cries that will come long after She will pass by, running late she will say that she can't with a cup in her hand with a plate on her head she will pass by again to outrun her delay / Let's send a mouth upon an apple An eye upon a thumb Let's start to gnaw the tongue by tip and syllable Let's drop our hands back of the clattering of a rain of letters / I run, you run and return You shake, you bawl I’ve done it all. You choked, A bit undone I run, you run, I return At all costs Reread your thoughts Drop by drop - Eat fast and put the mouthfuls in chains I told myself, that’s where you have to be on the pealing point stains of ugly and shapeless words time tolling in the future giant mice at the city’s gates scratching its plants to become invisible every day except those when her voice fills the footstep that will undo the morning between earmuffs and muscles that on the horizon cross with my steps widening your mouth to dress this flesh and bring off the roaming of my tongue in your gouts of blood No matter what I know you don't go outside my words. That you aren't weighed down just with my lower cases. That your fingers aren't pulled just by my upper cases. No dotted lines. No lines drawn Only the green of your eyes But I’ve fallen into my beaked shroud A good repast Eternal rest Between dog and she-wolf She goes to ground and unmasks her ears With four-leafed clovers She bores into the jaws of those settled there / Except madame geyser who sews herself new skins With no message from madame algosti at midnight Mister daddy breathing his words onto the heads of rosines with plaits Mister daddy would have been able to cover himself with his papers and so complete his nights, flanked by his two mothers-in-law who each keep an eye on him facing forwards swathed in the baby teeth of new sharks born long after the first flakes fell One more story that comes to cloud the drop of water on the mane of the horse. The new bergamots will pass by, four birds in each palm, a bit plump but keeping time A bitch within reach of my leg In the earth, under the earth, on the earth Belly filling with earth To empty my head And speak of women and financial curves To make this a bit cool A bit sad. A bit bloodsucky Trying different ways to dip breath back into a wind gone by The nude will arrive knowing that tonight there was no dream with twenty-one stains on the breath A second P with S, followed by two Ts, a third P with no S topped with a white bar followed by three Ts, clutched by two ears, dressed in three buttons and a fly in step with the water and the hard-pressed clouds In the same cooked thickness Where populace rhymes with necropolis Words as warring as coarse To buy from my three babies A small room in this rumpus With the dreams of a small amnesiac jackal / The dream will come The worst will become A small amnesiac jackal To wedge your head In the corner of an open table Between eye and ovary A machine to travel through time That will stay there And won’t come back For two travelers and a cannon Warm baby cows that want to eat lettuce Wrapped round by brigitte On a bulbous line Circled by half-moons Passing through opera, lazarus, trinidad A milk-grey bear A nasty chicken From the trials of the north and the rituals of the south A full fistful of red A pinch of beard Sectored by nausea and a bite to eat In the head of a hand cow Wrongly depending On the lean holes of a shepherdess And meanwhile Maigret’s hand gun will riddle Three of these walls That you want to hush up Laden with big spiraled bison – I knew what I knew wasn't far from what you hushed up There, in the crossroads of every stone, in its new mouth There, I saw her toes, her lips Her mad red locks of hair No calmer, no firmer Sixteen thousand pebbles poured out before my kennel A thousand nails in so many heads Each one on the move between the legs taking turns in my dreams We sink more and more into the cosmos. Here, we dive. We are in the midst of a whirlwind. In the deeps. How nice! I want to plunge in. It’s not the real universe. It’s a universe of sounds. Even nicer. There we are, in we go again In the workings of how many heads, how many hands, have I wallowed today? When I take a car that I drive on the highway, when I take a plane, a shuttle, when I take another car on the road again, when I find myself in a house where I eat, drink, get warm, turn on the light, cover myself, lie down … How many links, how many knots have I added on in my throat today? And suddenly, if my hand were to fail, if my eyes were to drop into the well of forgetfulness No more car, no more bus, no more roads, no more planes, no more house, no more lightning bolts, no more heat, no more water, no more bread, no more bed, no more covering, no more flesh Here, my hand drops, and my head next to my hand How could I ring in the same place differently so that you would answer me from a different place at every ring You peck at the daytime on the face you can see, and the night, on the divisible face of the moon. You top up your drunkenness according the splitting of seeds from the blows of your beak as though delivering a river crowned by a horn in the company of the magi You don't know why a jug so empty exhausts itself in your path To hammer your whiteness In the revolving stables / Like an olive Martinique Bare legs Between mandarin and louisiana A new lair in the rustling of leaves My head at the crossing of skins Shaven And transplanted beneath your skirts Just before me a door I, door, opening on other doors On the distended head of a lizard That gnaws its nostrils To crop its step towards day I breathe into your nose I eat from your mouth I defecate through your skin I block your ears I burst your arteries I cover your eyes I walk with your feet I shorten your arms I merge with your voice I soften your head and install myself inside When you have no more room for me O thou who art my brother So near to time and temples O thou whom I disfigure As faces abandon me For ten years I awaited a ring, a breath, a palpitation, and nothing moved. I stayed riveted to my chair, my thing. Time passed, and it only rang in my head, only palpitated under my tongue The same figure undone in her rhythm as though wanting to finger me in her eclipse [As long as I was there near you in this dwelling place I held in my hand the eternal] But what to do with the virgin on the chair with these dated deliveries Barely bared Barely a thread on the lips Translated by Donald Winkler |
Seyhmus Dagtekin is a Kurdish poet and writer. Dagtekin was born in the Harun village of Adiyaman province in Turkey. He currently resides in France, Paris, where has lived since 1987. He writes in Turkish, Kurdish or French, and is the author of seven poetry books, and a novel À la source, la nuit. He has played a leading role in renewing French poetry. Seyhmus Dagtekin has received prizes in France: The Mallarmé Poetry Prize 2007 and The Théophile Gautier Poetry Prize of The Académie Française 2008 for his book Juste un pont sans feu, The Yvan Goll International Francophone Poetry Prize for Les chemins du nocturne and the special mention of The Five Continents of the Francophonie Prize in 2004 for his novel.
|
