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