Take A
My husband
sleeps very late.
Then he gets up and sits on the couch.
And there he remains seated, into the afternoon,
looking at Claudia Schiffer’s nude body
in the magazines he hides in his closet.
He thinks I don’t know about it.
That I don’t know how he reels off desires and past times
in his solitude.
And how he looks at our daughters.
That’s what he does until coffee time
when he goes to empty his bladder of saltpetre
with beer and domino.
sleeps very late.
Then he gets up and sits on the couch.
And there he remains seated, into the afternoon,
looking at Claudia Schiffer’s nude body
in the magazines he hides in his closet.
He thinks I don’t know about it.
That I don’t know how he reels off desires and past times
in his solitude.
And how he looks at our daughters.
That’s what he does until coffee time
when he goes to empty his bladder of saltpetre
with beer and domino.
Take B
He has heart trouble
and he suffers from a high level of velvet crabs in his blood
he has pyrex eyes from the nurses,
who make his blood boil with sugar
and cotton, every two hours.
Sometimes he whines at the doctors
or he laughs, ever so slightly,
in that microwave of his brain
where he cooks prewashed
feelings.
He has hybrid man trouble,
hypertension,
he is almost a hippopotamus tied to a sanitary bed,
because there is something of a child in him,
or of a pirate, sometimes a lamprey man
But he knows little of that desperate illness,
medlars cramming themselves into his veins,
although all he tells his sons is,
cursed headaches,
feed some logs into my vital signs.
Take A
From the boat it’s the first thing one sees.
Always in front of the buildings, huddled together
like barnacles of fog.
Perhaps there is a patient in the window,
like a cazumbi
looking out at this sad sea.
Each one is one self
and one self is always different from the others.
That’s why each one must suffer his own sorrows.
There are so many each ones who will come to have an omelet this morning!
That’s what I think.
I myself feel in the movement of this sea
the best and the worst of each day.
In it I stir my blood sweetly
and my blood in turn warms my temples every day.
It is a strange feeling.
Then, off to cook for the workers all the blessed time.
Take B
The patients are softened in corridors of fire
and something viscous penetrates
the boiling
of rotten hypodermics.
It comes from the estuary like the smell
of sardines / and the voices of the embalo*.
And the stomach stuffed with fog.
And the bloodshot eyes.
* Embalo is a method of fishing practiced on the coasts of Mauritania and Senegal whereby the fishermen, standing waist-deep in the ocean, beat the water with sticks and their hands so as to get dolphins–attracted by the resulting noise– to swim towards the shore, frightening smaller fish into the awaiting nets of the fishermen. (T. N.)
