Table of Contents
About This Book
Copyright
Epigraph
Quivering The Use of Tiny Vertigos
The Inside of Someone
The Inside of Someone: version2 and The Inside of Someone: other version
The Inside version3 and The Inside
The Inside Reversed
White Piano Hotel Furama, L.A.
Piano frontera
Piano Topology
Paragraphs of Eternity
Story
Piano Prose You
Without Story
Ultrasound
Streaming
Shade of the Ephemeral Without Familiarity
Streaming (continued)
Streaming
About the Author and Translators
Colophon
About This Book
Between the verbs quivering and streaming, White Piano unfolds its variations like a musical score. With a play of resonance between pronouns and persons, between prose and poetry, and narrating a constellation of questions, this new book of poetry by the internationally renowned Nicole Brossard offers readers a ‘language that cultivates its own craters of fire and savoir-vie.’
first English edition
English translation copyright © Robert Majzels and Erín Moure, 2013
Original French text copyright © Nicole Brossard, 2011
Originally published in 2011 in French as Piano blanc by Les Editions L’Hexagone
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, for our translation activities. Coach House Books thanks, for their support, the Block Grant Programs of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. We also appreciate the support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Brossard, Nicole, 1943-
[Piano blanc. English]
White piano / Nicole Brossard ; translated by Robert Majzels and Erin Mouré. — 1st English ed.
Poems.
Translation of: Blanc piano.
ISBN 978-1-77056-345-2
I. Majzels, Robert, 1950- II. Mouré, Erin, 1955- III. Title. IV. Title: Piano blanc. English.
PS8503.R7P51813 2013 C841′.54 C2012-908532-4
This ebook was produced with http://pressbooks.com.
This title is available as a print book: ISBN 978-1-55245-273-8
We have to confront our own variation.
– Michel Serres
1
it’s a quiet Wednesday
no one clamours
light reaches the body
coils round the wrists
darkness held in custody
2
softly we talk
of slipping toward the brink
disfigured
far from humanity
3
in the morning I’ve a number in my feelings
an eye of second person plural
a notion with me fed by emotion
by animal kingdom and by azul
4
now you watch out for the commas
that erase and raise the night
now when the time comes you caress
a sheet of water and its logic of conflagration
5
I say what they say
about not telling lies
it’s infinitely
risky, and we breathe
6
one hour before summer
night had a body
as in certain phrases
at the edge of the universe
7
language I’ll say yes
from the top of my rib cage
language will you come
out and unearth the salt the certitude
The Use of Tiny Vertigos
whoever still insists on clinging to the real
to stammer in the repertoire
of guns and the serial loops of others
upright our body doesn’t think any less
sea, hunger, the mysterious manoeuvre
of air and its fabulous leaps in the chest
at the speed of shadow
to break free of the self you have to toe the line
between centuries and galaxies celestial hopscotch
our mythology of millennial night
a few names of beasts with hearts ripped out
fruity transparency of our sexes
it all breaks free of the self alive too brief
The Inside of Someone
I say the inside of someone not knowing
out of what muscle bone or ligament
if it’s a line of horizon in the brain
or knots of night in the throat
not knowing if it’s tender
or vast word with a name
The Inside of Someone: version2
first an idea of darkness
then I have hands
a few syllables jettisoned
but rough tide of morning returns
and the inner world is outspread
with shores of organic silence
The Inside of Someone: other version
okay so it’s thick
with images of slow skiffs and cliffs
in the midst of dead languages
okay so too much absolute crashes in the gut
The Inside: version3
even if no one’s there
the essential rolls eager with innards and infancy
draws its own lines of life
anecdotes not quite cannibal
even in the absence of pronouns
the essential absorbs the heat
of the frescoes of frenzy and confession
The Inside
without lux(ury) language strains unbearable
so I move quick
if we slow down if we erase I insist
I’ve just got to juggle
elsewhere slowly soaking softens me
come on narration I await
your indiscreet questions your ideas of having a blast
it’s so simple, and pain we can recount
to substitute the carnivores
The Inside Reversed
grammar of echo round constellated
of peoples in flight,
city legs knees hurry up cited
then hope of superstition
a comfort of the end of the world
out there a rich foam of intimate life
spelled sky that thunders right up to the pupils
too much love and not enough
afterward we say it’s the North
and we go to bed with a woman
in the silence slow foliage
we sleep right through the night
without punctuation or sepulchre
in the machine to inundate the world
suddenly I’m where the wind begins
I’d like to understand
mammals, the humanity that runs
in the veins
the hand-to-hand combat of grief
the drowned world the images of farewell
how our lips
and the huge side of the sea
other times it’s suspicious I become
a generation a vine
a cascade of shadows and of dialogues
Hotel Furama, L.A.
in the lounge white piano
a work in imagination
curled fingers centred over the keyboard
no night can live up to night and its story
Hotel Furama
the dictatorship rose up
all blue, all night
nuggets of interdiction
it would be dark
in a mirror at night it would be impossible
to lean close. To open our arms
every morning in the name of small survivals
the bougainvillea climb up to our knees;
later in the belligerent gleam of muscular
limos, we examine the ego
surveillance cameras and whirlpool baths
the Occident wavers
outside, a blue wind
uniforms
plastic chairs turned toward the void
between the lips small dexterous Is
by the thousands tormented
fists, palms primed for stones and backhand caresses
later, white piano
throat ardent, I know:
a life at the keyboard’s well worth
the sincere shadow of a voice
right up to the eardrums the unfurling
why speak without shivers
the becoming of water the thought
the silence framed field of light
as for the trees
that’s all we do we count the rings
count up the bodies of women at dawn
particles of soul in the air
by the pool: we were saying here’s a water
of America and of takeoff
here’s a viable me
a devouring mouth in the heat wave
rest easy
the white piano soothes no one
in the absolute
we are very solo
with an intensity of adieu
‘John Cage was interested in the piano as a percussion instru-
ment, inserting various objects between the strings, such as
screwdrivers, keys, coca-cola bottles,
in a technique called prepared piano’
it’s a piano’s shadow
ache smooth unceasing
of piano piano
Piano frontera
the vultures had already eaten her tongue and eyes
– a witness
fence we called it barbed wire
wall or whisper to me
also another phrase
between here and over the border
I still have a head on my shoulders
from the other side of the rio the sun licks
an eye, perfect
traverse it we must
between crosses and nails
bouquets of irises no una de más
Eyelids 1
her mouth plays dead while blood
trickles in the dust of a vacant lot
her mouth makes nO sound
not even a coagulated gesture
lightly on what’s left of lipstick
almost not dead
just a palpitation a word snagged
in the soft fold of the cheek we all have
a word caressed with the tongue
like a sliver of pepper, ire
Eyelids 2
we don’t say eyes anymore
an eye here eye that shines lurking
slave amid glints of prose
Eyelids 3
you still have your head
it happens every day
with blood that streams in decline
routine of round bellies
piled up just before death
anyway you can count
Eyelids1
your mouth’s full of thirst
still you breathe
piano massacre of teeth
the mouth in front of you does it whisper
yes, or unspeakable springs to mind
in the damp crimson mix of seconds
the eyes, the lips: more blood
you enter the nO sound
the mouth is immobile
abyss, you feel the urge to leap
images too of vital organs
Eyelids2
the eye’s no longer shaped like an eye
neither yours nor hers
her eye moves like an eye
as soon as you compare
it’s no longer an eye
iris the word doesn’t apply
only cornea
all the rest is torn up
on the brink of sinking
into nO noise
the chasm of the face
Eyelids3
don’t confuse head and face
from up close it’s round easier
with hair bolting horses reared up
but for the neck knocked red to the ground
Eyelids I
all night the mouth pulses
respiratory solution
its own heat is what keeps it moist
with cold-blooded sincerity
that hems between dialogues
Eyelids II
now the eye’s in the nO
in space a slow crevice anticipates
its own erasure
Eyelids III
half a life, half a sonata
white panic piano
you repeat: this is nonetheless a head
a woman’s head round as a planet
from ankles to wrists to eyelids
you enter the nO nothing of being
Eyelids (mouth)
eyelids are no longer up to the task
bouquet of lipstick, her mouth cut
from all story stream universal
in the tiny background of numbers
Eyelets (eye)
from the other side of the phrase
the eye is a border eye
fear and its damp have unravelled
the eye of prose right up to cosmic blue
Eyelids (head)
we had to shut our eyes
in front of you a head una de más
line of abyss
between the throat and nape the nape
We wear Mortality
As lightly as an Option Gown
Till asked to take it off –
– Emily Dickinson
Piano Topology
Every language when we breathe it is
brief as we say my mother to the depths
of return
in each language our violence is intact
we inhale it with its collisions
its t/errors and small print
then in 3steps in a Neues museum
stroke of the bow
an image deflects our attention
in reality reading helps us vanish
the everyday self from words reborn
there where once we left as dust
anonymous in the mystery of breaths
or in a book line skipped typo erased
no language rests in the universal
sooner or later between our lips all languages
all tongues sift darkness
scraps of refrains
wall whispers it’s still
Berlin with risks of error and errantry
between the Gropius Museum and the Topography
of Terror
from there see the short man in glasses
a white skull on his cap
we see clearly that the city is a place
big enough for 60million faces
and a whiff of cosmos
and always the idea that in the distance
versatile it’s our fertile life
still credible
our way of breathing
at first language goes right through us
with a little monkey tremor
curious
cloaked in absence we know it, it leaps
alphabrat deceiver
of arms and repeated legs
all day Sunday, and days of invention
every language cultivates its own craters of fire
its wells of flavours and consent
a crazy number of lessons abbreviated in our ch
ests
as for our body
do we really speak by simulating
head tipped over opposite of anguish
do we speak reciprocal
body hunched in its hunt for breathing
this morning language transformed
my mammal intentions
into one idea two lives exploded
in the chest
under my warm coat
one hour later of melancholy
all along the Spree
piano bang of keys in the arteries
we’ll foresee the sapidity of blood rolled in our 5senses
and xtimes the flavour: juniper clove mint viburnum
as for our body no one knows if it still wants
to speak fruits or white piano up to the brow
to soak in history
softly
sink into what follows and the silk lamé of the horizon
… where there are no sentences, there is no truth …The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.