Kathryn A. Kopple
The Venus Calva
When I gnaw your
elastic and rebellious hair I seem to be
eating memories.
Charles Baudelaire
The day they became wedded—or netted—to one another, he said that he wanted to live forever in her hair. In the sea of her hair, the night of her hair. He worshipped her tresses, which reminded him of dark meteor showers, silver fish, and black, shiny coral.
When he began to eat her hair, she didn’t notice--not at first--but then, little by little, he devoured her beauty and--desolate and barren--she punished him with lightning bolts and hail stones. He spat into his hands and rubbed them on her head, in the hopes that her long, long tresses would grow back again. His efforts produced no results. Gone, gone were those sunken continents. He also sank, slept, and when he woke from his opium dreams, he could feel her tugging at his mouth. “Where is my hair!” she cried before she plunged her fingers down his throat to retrieve her stolen memories.
Kathryn A. Kopple
is a translator of Latin American poetry and prose. She has published translations in numerous literary reviews and anthologies, including: Chain, Puerto del Sol, Fiction International, boundary 2, and The Are Not Sweet Girls. She is a graduate of Bennington College and holds a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from New York University. She is delighted to have published work in DM (we are, too). Her most recent poetry appears in The Hummingbird Review.
Francis Carco
(1886-1958)
The Shadow
When I waited for you in the bar
That night amongst the drunks
Who snickered when they tried to laugh,
It seemed to me that you came late,
And that somebody followed you in the street.
I saw you look around before you came in.
You were afraid. You closed the door.
And your shadow stayed outside.
It was that which had followed you.
Your shadow is always in the street,
Near the bar where I waited for you so often.
But you are dead.
And your shadow ever since is in the doorway.
And wherever I go now, it follows me,
Fearfully, like a beast.
If I stop, it stops.
If I speak to it, it runs away.
* * *
Your shadow is the color of rain,
Of my regrets, of time which passes.
It may disappear and hide itself,
But when night comes, it is everywhere.
At the subway station La Chapelle,
In the poor and clamorous slums,
It waits for me behind the black pillars,
Where other fraternal shadows
Wave to passersby and call
With great gestures of hopelessness.
But the passersby never turn around.
Not one has ever known why,
In the wind which makes the street lamps blink,
In the cold wind, full of mystery,
Suddenly they quicken their steps.
And I, who seek you where you might be,
I, who know that you wait for me there,
I pass without recognizing you,
I come and go all night,
I walk alone, just like in the old days,
And your shadow, the color of rain,
Driven at each step by the wind,
Your shadow is lost in the night,
But I feel it all about me.
* * *
When you were just a streetwalker,
Just an innocent prostitute,
Like the girl who appeared
In Whitechapel
One night, to Thomas De Quincey,
And whom he sought, too late, and never found,
From doorway to doorway and hotel to hotel —
As he tells in a book.
It was there, for the first time, that I met you.
You were tired and sad, like the tarts of London.
Your hair still held an odor of fog.
And while they stood you drinks,
The drunken longshoremen insulted you,
Or went home with you in the sombre street.
I never forgot the effect which you had on me,
In that hopeless book.
Nor the wind, nor the rain, nor the gleaming pavement,
Nor the murderers of the night,
Nor the flares of the coffee stalls,
Nor the eddies of the Thames,
Between its dismal embankments.
Now, after all those years,
Another who resembles you
Comes, along the grey buildings,
Beckons to me and accosts me.
* * *
It is not you. It is everything which you call back to me.
As I was sad before I knew you,
As I sank down with pleasure in my sorrow,
Walking the streets, going into the bars,
Begging the shadows of the night to speak to me,
Wandering on and on without stopping —
But everywhere it was too late.
The music of an accordion breaks off with a cough.
They take down the lights one after another.
A passerby from whom I ask a light
Holds out to me a dead cigar.
Wherever I turn my steps it is the same story,
I am always going toward the train whistles,
On a great boulevard troubled and peopled with ghosts.
There I wait for I do not know who, I do not know why —
But the trains pass screaming,
And this waiting is more like leaving.
You have come to go away,
I have brought you to these desolate places,
And you have said to me, “Whatever you do,
It is me, from now on, you will see among all these ghosts.
You will feel me near you.
You will think that I am dead.
And you will never forget me.”
* * *
I listened to you and followed you under the streetlights.
There was no one but us alive where we went.
Only us, but I knew that of the two of us, the first
To say goodbye would be you.
There is no use trying to
Hold you by your little hand.
The cries, the rumbling, the smoke of the trains,
The rails and their signal lights,
The black bridge all resounding,
The noise of the heavy boxcars bumping each other,
By an obscure foreboding have already separated us.
* * *
Another time, in the same sinister district,
We seat ourselves on a bench in the night.
And the wind which drives the rain,
The lamps of the rooming houses,
The pimps in their damp sweaters,
The girls who stare at us,
Gather around us, their witches’
Circle draws in on us.
Then you are put to tears,
Trying to explain to me, without raising your voice,
That one day you will deliver me
From these ghosts who are in me —
You talk and the rain falls.
It is the rain which makes you weep,
With a grief which nothing can appease,
With an inconsolable pain.
And the round of shadows and of the lights of houses
Revolves tirelessly
With the guys and their girls,
The bars where the jukeboxes grind,
Flinging to us sometimes through the door
The call of a dead voice —
The round which nothing can stop,
Turns and carries me with it, with you who are dead,
Turns and will carry me always, with all my past,
Out of time, out of the world, out of all that is
Or is not, as you, in the shadow, you know -
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth