Mariées rebelles

Wild brides, c'est le premier recueil de poésie publié de Laura Kasischke. Et le premier qui nous est traduit en français. Mais en nous proposant les textes originaux en face (ce qui est super chouette). Du coup, tu lis en anglais, tu apprécies le rythme, le choix des mots, l'ambiance bizarre (oui, dans sa poésie aussi) et puis tu jettes un oeil au français pour les mots qui t'ont échappés. Et tu avances tranquillement dans le recueil. Parfois, tu frissonnes. Parfois, tu trouves ça glauque. Parfois, tu ne comprends pas tout. Tu te repères avec Médée, qui coupe en quatre le recueil. Tu croises des femmes, des épouses, des familles. C'est malsain. C'est eros et thanatos en banlieue. Mais c'est puissant !

J'ai envie de vous mettre quelques extraits, de vous encourager à découvrir ce recueil. J'aurais pu en mettre bien plus, mais il faut choisir ! Parmi ceux que j'ai beaucoup aimé aussi il y a Palm, After my little light, I sat in the dark, Bells of ice, Passion, The sorceress and the wife.

Massacre of the Innocents (after Pieter Brueghel)

Pale rubies dripped from the branches
like red gems of ice, and Rachel
was weeping. And the cold
snow of Bethlehem, of Flanders.
The soldiers moved slowly
as a forest, confused
and eager as metal animals. Herod
was sleeping. Rachel
refused to be consoled. Hide
the childrens, the cried. Hold
the babies higher. But 
the world was unraveling. The future
had found them. The pond
was frozen sharp
and white as a wing.
And no one saved them. No. God
fled to Egypt, by donkey
through the snow, cold
snow of Egypt, of Flanders, of France.
A star was seen exploding
in the East, precisely
over themselves. They could have hidden, but
no angel appeared
to them. The soldiers arrived
grey and still, and their mothers
pleaded, and a voice was heard,
too late and wailing. In the cold
snow of Oklahoma,
or Dachau, or Peru. Wailing
and loud lamentation.
An old man got down on his knees
and begged to have
the baby back. Cape
of Good Hope.

Porch

When she died I believed that she was dead, but now
we meet each night in a world between ourselves
where she is more alive
than I have ever been.

On the front porch we talk
and rock in the wicker rockers
that ruined in the rain
even before she had gone.
The dead we love enter
the earth from here :
It is night, the front porch
between a meteor storm
and the new grass growing.

The yard is full of sweat-pea
and poison sumac, bittersweet
and brimstone.
The summer before
and all the summers since

are over and have never been.

In space the stars turn
to ash and incandescence, 
but it's too much to try to understand.
She says, Someday you'll learn to see
with all your eyes.

This amazes me.
My breath light is burning down but hers
has turned inward, become
truly lucent,
purely life.
She pulls her nightgown down
to show me the scars again
where they let death out of her.

I turn my head :
too bright, too beautiful.

She laughs. She says,
You're still the weaksister, the one
who was meant to die.

When I wake up
I need to believe -

Though - once I watched a swan die
of a fishhook caught in her throat.
In that still black river 

she seemed to sing
but it was pain that peeled
the notes from her.

Maybe that's all it is
to dream about the dead.

The bride between them

That night his bride's face
becomes the moon's surface
in his bed. Between dreams
he is climbing
the narrow step to her.
She wakes that night,
saying :

Now, think out
into all that might happen
to us. What it means, the future.
We'll look back later and remember
how it was tonight,
not knowing.

The house fills up with winter
months later. He sweeps up
the fireplace, afraid 
to find something
still alive among the ashes.
She is gone, fallen
into the bed of a man
he knows and loves.
Her bridal dress burns black.

Years ago, at any wedding
in any room full of people,
he would not have known
how a man's best friend
could become his bitter enemy,
how the eyes of the woman
he would love would look
moon-cold and closed.

He would not have known 
that to crawl up to the black, sad
sleep of love
is not to want to live.
His own ghost glowing there. 

In any room full of people
there are already two or three
wearing funeral shrouds
beneath their wedding clothes.
There is one at the altar
who will hold a knife 
to the throat of a friend.
A woman who can forget anything.
Two men who might share
the bride between them. 

The wind is cold.
Two dark cats claw in the snow.
He stands at the window
and understands
how one sweet creature
could gnaw another to death.