Corporations
for François Billoux
Neither the flowers, nor your girls
Make us a shield
Against your tentacles
Where police move.
*
You are lanterns of gold
At the end of long hallways
In your offices of wool,
Illuminating nothing,
Going on just to go on.
*
You rot, you rot
Si lentement,
And when you rot
It isn’t just about you.
*
But where is humanity
In all this?
For whom
This poem?
Is it for walls
Or for people?
For papers
Or for heads?
They gather together
Like a material.
And it steals and kills
By the millions of bodies.
*
He sang for you,
L’absurde coucou.
For you, au soleil,
His cri répeté.
For your strongboxes
And your offices,
The cry of the cuckoo
Like alcohol.
*
We want nothing to do
With your pleasures.
We want nothing to do
With your words.
All we want to do is make
You lose.
*
Here are the common brooms
And here is the sea.
Listen a little
How it says to you:
Against the future
No force can win.
Listen again
How it says to you:
Betrayal
Cannot hold.
*
From your offices of wool
You call in the world
And you shake hands
On the loot (lutte?) du jour.
On all points of the globe
You stick your pins.
*
You are placeless,
You pin the globe.
Your offices of velvet
Have no scenery
To tie themselves to.
The neighborhoods are low,
So low, so far from you.
*
You hollow out a void
Around each one.
You put up walls
Around each one.
You inhale it all
And leave voids
Ringed by walls,
By ideas of walls.
*
And between you,
All over the globe,
You’re for one another
And in one another,
Knot of spiders
Melding their legs,
As well as their heads,
To embrace or absorb one another.
*
If to be a victor
Is to reduce to your mercy
Those who make the earth
Give of itself what you need,
Then you are indeed
So often victors.
*
A living crow
Cut in half
Whose two red parts
Regard each other,
That’s you and us.
*
You see everything from on high.
You direct from on high.
You look down,
You observe the downcast.
It’s from down low,
In fact,
Where the people will rise
With their great faces.
*
—You stick in—
That’s your fate.
And it’s up to us
To rip you out.
*
You’ll agree:
It’s more than a breeze
That stirs between you
Les fils que vous tenez.
Orage and great wind
Over the capital.
*this ~translation, which leaves some of Guillevic’s French untouched, owes much to Denise Levertov’s ♥♥♥ translation (as published in this New Directions Selected Poems).
Quarrellary. 