Michel Deguy: “Coronation”

CORONATION

“The coronavirus”… already a hemistich!

The epigram can cadence !

 

Contamination comes down the Contamines

Your confines my confines confine themselves

But our confines overwhelm confinement

Wewe contaminates itself

I hear the economy shrink in the purse-exchanges

 

Ten million Chinese will have lost face

   Masks and videos glare & face off 

 

Fat Trump has tweeted

“No virus in the States”

Putin has put God back in the constitution

Le Pen with her rusty key

locks the borders

Her buddy Boris as Victoria-buffoon

Repaints his City as Singapore-on-Thames

 

The cruises enquarantaine themselves docked as covirus’d

Venise saved from the Waters

The Greens so satisfied before the elections

Are disconcerted  

 

The film plays globalization backward

The blue sky blues up again in Beijing

The Parisian pedestrian scooters his spleen 

 

Six million Lombards & 631 †

80 929 for Xi & more than 3000 †

1784 Hexagonals & only 33 †

 

The word recognition has lost its good sense

Leaving Levinas retracing the DNA

Globalization & pandemic meet

& won’t leave each other again

The migrants will die encoronavirused

The Libyan smugglers raise the bidding

 

But don’t you worry, sweetie

  It’s all gonna start up again

Emperor Xi unmasks his sinicism

Michel Deguy

 March 2020

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4 Responses

  1. Katie Yates says:

    Brilliant. J’adore. Just read to my son ‘Tuareg Proverbs from the Ahaggar’ from “Poems For The Millenium” (Book of North African Literature” and then this came up for us on FB. Beautiful. A soccer player/translator in the making. xox

  2. Kay Clark says:

    Wonderful! Don’t speak French but able to follow along via translation. Internet=saving grace during this scary time. Many thanks.

  3. Kent Johnson says:

    I rode on a tour bus with him, in Leningrad, in 1989. I was sitting beside Michael Davidson. Across the aisle, Barrett Watten, next to Ron Silliman, was studiously writing in a notebook. The Neva flowed on our right. Massive baroque buildings went by on our left. What do you think about all this, said Michael. He was asking me, but Michel Deguy, sitting in front of us, next to Lyn Hejinian, turned around and said, with a scowl, It is very strange, and the future will be here suddenly, you will see.

  4. Exact! C’est la verite de la absurdite–et l’absurdite de la
    notion que la race humain est plus q’une chauve-souris!
    .

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