Poems by Victor Blanc

Poem found on the Internet

What got into me to live What
Was I thinking in my old hat
In what country have I caught
This malaria of dreams
And who broke the lime green glass
Of broken cooing lines
Death need not ring itself with doves
And adrift goes my no-good life
Like a mass grave of climbing vine
A building site left incomplete
By some sad slapdash starling
With swallow-stolen orbs
O my industrial birds
Death need not ring itself with doves
And if I could go on and on
Quack-quack of quaint car-horns
I would go a-strangling birdies
My song dies in a hoarse pinch
In the tune of a chaffinch
What have I come up with good grief
Death need not ring itself with doves
I need to engrave fragments
From the past on my skin At the clotted
Heart of my berserk bosom
And I can hear a nightingale
Singing the fair hauberk of dawn
I will stammer like a parrot
Death need not ring itself with doves
History's a water of sorts D'you know
Unquenchably wasted
Some stale-fresh saliva
I will wed the human race
One day and their queer crows
Wet with their bleak kisses
Death need not ring itself with doves
At the vanguard
between the sharp stakes of dusk
a blood-soaked dove
Again gives up its dovish ghost
Death need not ring itself with doves

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Translation by Cédric Gauthier



Salomé


Standing in the blond night Salomé
Holds in her hand the fountain-head
She has danced Is it for her
And in her hair sleepless
Harrases are dancing

Am I the head Or is it Herod
Concealed in the curtains
I will write as one who dreaming purls
Words tattooed on his back
Scattered like jackstraws
Her moving body teaches me
The remote deaths of prophets
Day is dying over Lateran
And there are kneeling tyrants
Tete a tete Salomé is kindling
The spark whereby the wick
Of violent revolutions burns
Salomé is dancing in the smoke
Salomé Fire-smelling woman
There are only her hips
When the oracles break
Under her feet forgotten planets polarize

It was today of long ago

There is no more dancing to the slow pace of palaces
Tar is smoking
The town is melting
Under the epileptic neons
Sham Salomés
Frantically
Masturbate on the sound of ardent music

Amid these women I am
Like some alcohol spilled out
Sticking to all the feet
Paris is like a firecracker
Seine-tinselled under a shimmering sky
Over the roofs stars groom themselves up
I can no longer get the algebra of party-goers
Poetry is going out of fashion
Mythologies are dead
Their memories have eroded

There's only Salomé intoxicated
True and naked
By the dark wine of my thoughts
Dancing Dancing through the streets
Dancing through the ways of the earth
And hanging on her lips
The old world is dying
And with her eyes my head goes off
Hanging on her lips
The world is dying
And younger grows my shadow


Translation by Cédric Gauthier

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Victor Blanc was born in Paris in 1992. After studying modern French literature, Éditions de l’Île Bleue published his first book of poetry, Réalité augmentée (“Augmented Reality”) in 2012. In 2014, a second collection of poems, Paradis argousins (“Paradises Rozzers”) was published by Éditions Le Temps des Cerises and prefaced by poet and photographer Franck Delorieux. Victor Blanc regularly writes articles for the cultural newspaper Les Lettres françaises.

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