White Piano Read online

  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<
br />
  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

  of massacres

  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

  urge to somersault

  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.