Seven poems from José-Flore Tappy’s Trás-os-Montes / On the Seawall
- Post By: johntaylor
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Seven poems from José-Flore Tappy’s collection Trás-os-Montes (Éditions La Dogana, 2018) have appeared in English translation on Ron Slate’s website On the Seawall. Here are the poems:
The only sunny spot,
our waterlogged shoes stuffed
with old newspapers and seeming to know
where the living is going on
between the windows to draft-proof
and the deserted kitchen, its flagstone floor
smooth as a pond
On the table,
the low glow of mint
hastily gathered in ditches,
upstairs the weary screaming children
and the ever irritating
question of the keys
* * *
Amid pungent wool and deadwood,
when the tiles are misted up,
at the back of the kitchen, she’s already dressed,
starts warming the milk,
attentive to those who are missing,
gone off without saying where
(or why)
as well as to those slumbering
in the upper rooms
Servant of the smoky fireplace,
she stoops down, straightens back up,
sweeps the walls
with her own smoke
* * *
Few things are equivalent
and still shared
from door to door; soap and lye,
rumors or newspapers—
but water, so rare, who would barter it?
some people even channel it off
for their own use
Deaf to these meannesses,
stubbornly turned
toward remnants of living together
she trades in
what she has at hand
until the end she resists
anything which, by too lofty a gesture,
would place her in the limelight
* * *
She has sorted, readied, stored away
everything for harsh days
when to little will be added
the worry of less
Between the logs,
the kindling paper;
hanging from the ceiling beam,
dried vegetable tops, towels,
rose-colored onions
* * *
Before nightfall
take the ashes outside
in a metal bucket,
the peelings
behind the courtyard,
the leftovers
with the bread
to the dogs
Above the houses
the light swiftly
sweeps
claw marks
that make the sky
flushed
* * *
I cross the threshold and slip outside,
long splinter in the black night
first the street with its dirty papers
lying about, then the trail
with its sinuous course, more sinuous
than my peeled sentences
clutching to the page
trail so spindly between the stones,
I reassure it with my feet
* * *
We knot up phrases,
tie them to each other,
stitch by stitch,
this is how around us
spreads a big net of noises,
conversations, murmurs,
in which a whole village of dirt,
of asphalt,
awakens, dangling
our voices crisscross at dawn
like blurry headlights,
like the daisies faded from
your old apron
pale, they brush
against the ground
without breaking
(translations © John Taylor)
All of José-Flore Tappy’s previous collections are available in the bilingual Bitter Oleander Press edition Sheds / Hangars: Collected Poems 1983-2013.
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