Two Poems by Nicole Brossard

after : we are an appearance
an unknown alphabet, humanity’s dead angle
a taste for drunkenness that barks that grabs
confusing everything long ago and fast not yets
after someone mrmrs
me at any time of day and of brain
I am not truly myself only
yesterday in time or the cosmos

*

after, when the being’s low will still
wants to translate
background sound overcome with life

after the lost shadow of the reeds
and of the verb vanish
the slow oxygen of the whole alphabet

after you will cram into another species

*
[Translated by Pierre Joris] [italics: in English in the original]

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