Translated from the French by Elaine Terranova
from The Last Children’s Book (Le dernier livre des enfants)
(untitled)
I write because I am going to disappear.
It was there,
My little girl sitting in the stairway, I look at her between the rails
Let’s not move
I love just to go on
It’s important to look at each other
Doubtless
One face calls out to another
The little ones, with nothing else to say
So at night if I can hear the cat eating at last,
Him so thin, I know he’s moving his fine-boned chin
He needs to eat, to forget about us
While the food crunches in his teeth
By that crunching if we wanted, we’d know where he is
Squeezing between the rails, grazing them
Without becoming frightened
Especially when an animal turns its head, hesitates
Then returns to its bowl where some solitude remains
SOMEWHERE IN BERLIN
Boy, boy
The shed is not so large that he shouldn’t run into him
It’s beyond me
With the brim of his cap pointing straight ahead he is easy to follow
The cold air does not obscure the bolting body
The first time he turned his head but the kiss
Was fast
Now the disgust of loving
Shuts his mouth. Their silence
He has held him by the head, the head under the cap
The wool bespoke the misery of the boy who has grown too much alone
Pinned against the wall, pinned to the ground
Really
He hugs him tenderly as if crying together
The tears of one drop onto the other’s face
ONE SUMMER EVENING
In the time it takes to open, to close the door of the armoire
A keen burn passes between my thighs comes and goes
It’s true
They could have
With their whole weight
Sweating from holding me
A woman might have spread my legs apart
Tried to spread my legs
Even though the screams do not come from there
Everything howls that the knife catches
With her legs held, a little girl is still moaning
The container is set aside
Two hands hold down her head
It is time to drive in
The thorns and sew
Then the moan comes out from lower down
From lower and lower
A woman staggers her whole life long
This is how fear becomes a female plant
And how
I open the armoire again
Not to look inside
But in order to stop moving
Or in order to move
Since I do as I choose
Even naked, it’s as I choose
Ariane Dreyfus is a French poet, retired professor, literary critic, and activist. She was born in 1958, as she says, “to exiles,” Ashkenazi Jewish on her father’s side and Indochinese on her mother’s. She is the author of 16 collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in most major literary periodicals and prominent anthologies in France and was included in New European Poets, ed. Kevin Prufer and Wayne Miller (Graywolf Press, 2008). Le dernier livre des enfants (Flammarion, 2016) is her 8th book of poems. She is a consultant on the boards of the magazines Poezibao and Remue.net. and continues to teach poetry writing workshops. Nous nous attendon and Iris, c’est votre bleu was published in Poesie/Gallimard in 2023. Forthcoming is “double été” (printemps, 2024).
Elaine Terranova has published eight poetry collections, two chapbooks of poetry, and a memoir, The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter: a Poet’s Memoir (Ragged Sky Press, 2021) about growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Philadelphia. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Laurel Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other magazines and anthologies. Her translation of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis is part of the Penn Greek Drama Series (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). She has received the Walt Whitman Award, a Pew Fellowship, an NEA, and a Pushcart Prize, among other awards. Her most recent book is Rinse (Grid Books 2023).
