It’s not death that will recreate the world,
death is accurate, death flows from the eye,
but it’s not the tears that will recreate the world.
A butcher combs the hair,
A butcher hangs up a bull’s carcass,
A calf on the other hand stands completely still
And licks the belly of the moon till its tongue burns.
— from A Sensitive Time, 1993
And one day everything is quiet,
the sun does not rise and then it sets,
it does not rain and then it pours
over the airport, the café table
and Camus’ American Journal .
Time is silent and indifferent,
the blue sky is simply invalid.
But one day everything is quiet
and the sun sets uniterruped.
I walk across the runway, I turn round
and then I never turn round again.
— from The Motor Milky Way, 1994
We are entering a darker era,
loneliness breaks out in the womb,
settles in every single bloody atom
and any old rodent will easiy outlive us.
A shirt hangs underneath the moon,
a wasp takes stock, and the night
penetrates deeper. But why are we
afraid? The factory stands there
lit up between the tree trunks;
beautiful the way we remember it,
and love; the real work,
is waiting in the heart.
— from The Motor Milky Way, 1994
We open up the night, we eat
and leave, and nothing is final.
We walk straight home and disappear
among everything we forget to receive.
We believe a little less than the sun
and a little more than a pinhead.
We think that salvation is a bother
which hangs about in the body,
like silence does.
— from The Motor Milky Way, 1994
I open the door on sunlight,
what use is great poetry to me.
I am thirteen and standing on a street corner,
Soot on my face, a dead dog in my arms.
Many years pass before I grasp
the meaning (I am sitting on a stair,
and my forehead is black yet enlightened):
Who says mountains are larger
than the hand when it pulls up
tufts of grass and buries a dog,
who says eternity understands more
than the finger which rubs the knee,
flicking away a grain of sand
or picking the scab off
and letting the blood flow.
— from The Motor Milky Way, 1994
He wanders around the streets
with the traffic behind him and a bottle
of milk he nabbed under is arm.
Twelve years-old and the lonely gunpowder
is already lodged in his blood.
He finds a scrap of silver paper
on a stair, and that was just the thing.
It grows light behind the factories;
the city believes it is wakening up,
but it is only time that
does not notice it is rotting away.
— from The Motor Milky Way, 1994
It is memories not one’s glance
which shines through the horizon
when it is crumpled up or repeated.
It is always like that in autumn:
the wind has its expressions,
the landscape turns difficult,
and yet you brush down your coat
and I think that I no longer think
about death, about the indecency
of being human—that nothing
will miss us like we do.
— from The Motor Milky Way, 1994
He discards a scab, holding onto
the warmth and everything that glows
from early to late September.
She is a cropped haired tomboy
with no cares, sitting watching the pigeons
filling the horizon while he rolls marbles
into the dusk. She is a loose-limbed
presence, a long-legged crutch,
and when things are ok, a branch
which rubs against his prick.
— from The Motor Milky Way, 1994
Two steps behind you, father, the roar of the sea is slate and foam and the beach does not disclaim a desire to get close, to sleep against your back after the snack of bread and spam. You lie down among the sand dunes with an arm over your face and we talk about cylinders and spare parts, but your voice has grown faint or is it my hearing. You get up and start the car, you drive along the breakers and I don’t know if you are leaving or drawing closer. In the agitated autumn light you resemble an emigrant on sufference or the end of a short century.
— from The Motor Milky Way, 1994
He is alone, he gets dressed and she does the same. She says she is not his little girl, but he is not afraid as long as time does not function, the eye functions and the mouth is more beautiful. Down in the street November starts up. The building across the street keep out the daylight, the traffic whirls up foam and the litter is pressed down in containers. But viewed from some other part of town the hotel room resembles a capsule lost in space, a deep sleep or a silent, bleak annihilation.
— from The Motor Milky Way, 1994
After the orgasms, when we stop down on the pavement and you stroke three fingers over my lower lip and I discover a scratch in the life I never had. The sunrise does not reach in to the most essential, as sleep and the unrequired soul are situated in a cooler zone and in the brilliance of autumn; it just is. You talk (absolutely calmly) about the poplars in a meadow long ago. Will you ever come back, I ask, but you do not answer, perhaps because there always is an almost in the word never.
— from Anticamera, 1996
And so another season is emptied, a brown Citroën passes low and we stand still in two shadows. The farewell starts in the tiny room, but we make it back to a finer mechanism, to the colours in the rain. At this time of year Paris is a star expanded by the dark, a visit by something we’ve only seen in our dreams. We hardly sleep, we talk in our sleep about the ridiculous in travelling inside all travels, all the speeds.
— from Anticamera, 1996
After the long journey from sleep you open out to the little balcony and the dry, white light hurts the eyes: it’s the reflections in the glasshouses, parts of the sun, something in the atomic structures. You strech out, the Avengers-shirt is too small, and the back of your head is shining. I think I would like to be a tree, live for hundreds of years—still, absolutely still.
— from Anticamera, 1996
In the afternoon the things surrounding us seem to be blown out of proportions: something red is folding out under a cloud and the woollen sweater in the sand is absorbing silence, a tugboat passes slowly and the world is suddenly without phonetic hang-ups. The history of thought is shorter than the thought and this is a beach to freeze on to.
— from After Forever, 1997
We only met 4 times and alway by coincidence, but when I saw you come out of the once stately, but now miserable looking cinema house, I had already given you a name: You stopped right in front of me (white dress, irregular breath). Later you said you didn’t remember the incident (a chronology out of time’s reach), but I told you I liked your face, that clouds reminded me of it.
— from After Forever, 1997