Poems | Matthieu Baumier

A red bird was tossing volleys of salt into the gashes in the earth

and you were spelling out the colors of silence within yourself
There was this salt in him–and
he was speaking
to the blue-scaled universe
to the fury of the river locks
and the devastation of trees.

He was saying:

“Bring the wind
against the drowned gesture of this time.”

And while you were still calling out
to the mute expressions of the ploughshares
The red bird merged into the graceful characters
of the slender willow,
erected walls around our utterances, the silence of clay,
the material of the potter, the soul of the Poem.

*****

 To enter the cavern places of being
And travel in the crucible of darkened lands
The prima matter of all light

And Ecce homo

This is accomplished on the inside
Behind the spiraling coils of the heavens
And appears as a spark
Ecce homo

Behold the reflection

And from the confines of the work
We recreate chaos
We strike, mallets in our hands
We sculpt entire continents
And see nothing of them.

We await the very order of the real
The apparent impossible signs
Of the Island silence
where we are reborn at the waters’ root.

*****

  To the memory of René Char

I am writing from this instant
the aftertime of the world’s end.

There where,
Tears of rain flow
Where words take the secret shapes
Of indecipherable vigils.

I am living through the passage of the soul
There where,
Stones inscribe
The landscape in flames.

I am living in the wake of phantom armies
And my eye comprehends only this silence.

I am writing from this instant the aftertime of the world’s end
And I assume a smile
Torn from the blood of stars.

I say this:

Let prose go silent now
And let the spirit of water spring forth.