{"id":15263,"date":"2019-04-01T03:02:30","date_gmt":"2019-04-01T08:02:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/?p=15263"},"modified":"2019-04-01T13:30:25","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T18:30:25","slug":"refusing-burial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/15263","title":{"rendered":"Refusing Burial"},"content":{"rendered":"

A poem by Mohammed Kha\u00efr-Edd\u00efne, translated from the French by Conor Bracken.<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not lamenting this taunted blood
\nbut a cast of hawks
\nhigh as the blood carries its irremediable bill
\nwith the sluice where death leans into my eye<\/p>\n

o sun
\nyour crutches shatter now
\nthe brief cry of earth clods tossed at the heavens<\/p>\n

my chest is an arms cache badly shut
\nand leaps better than a cricket
\nover the silence of my eye
\nover the charm of the echoless rock
\nwhere the Berber laps up his retinas<\/p>\n

over your death
\nAndr\u00e9 Breton rejected
\nby the grave to which the eye nailed the sun
\nby the sole murder by the day toasting
\nwith hemlock poured into your idioms
\nbut since the war in me is a maimed affair
\nsince fantasy is a soap that does not wash me
\nof the viridian men
\nwho rebel against the dead wave of oceans blooming
\ninto specter
\nme the only one surveilled by my gestures
\nsniped dead by a time worse than the poem
\nthe real time burns its hair in the red honey
\nof our voices
\nwhile negation carries this man in its tits
\nto the highest raid from which purity gushes
\nliberty is not milk or star or reason
\nvirility police not the joy of a dead season
\nbut this impenetrable blood
\nunder your fingernails
\nthey say death but what is a star without a cavern
\na head
\nif not a target offered to the present sewn up with crime<\/p>\n

strange
\nstrange threat!<\/p>\n

Each wind carries in it my death perfectly designed but I say to each wind Here\u2019s my death and I have mapped myself so well my edges no longer have a place to exist. I hand my death out like shots\u2014in the only street whose end is no more solid than a look rusty with absence and a crappy array. Your death is not just one death one box of matches hanging from the bottom of a bar not a glass of white wine not a clove of agony on the basement parquet where poetry lies pregnant and who wouldn\u2019t drool over all of the gold appalled by the solitary individual spectacle of our systematic burials.<\/p>\n

O poetry gag me now!<\/p>\n

The last word does not exist. The dynamite of the first word is enough.
\nMen my kegs of powder; men immunized against man;
\nman you have no more time to doubt;
\nman you lick your spittle and don\u2019t limp backwards;
\nman lost look;
\nwhen poetry ripens into the pure green of delirium and when the
\ndesert has surrendered its water to the incessant evil that fueled you
\nAndr\u00e9 Breton
\nwhen man has blown out Aladdin\u2019s lamp
\nwhen Ali Baba has claymored the void
\nwhen Jesus has finished devouring his cross
\nwhen Mohammed has hoarded enough money
\nto burst every pipe
\nthe eye turns to me
\nI sell my death
\nI am wounded in the chest
\n\u2014apple tree
\nold armor
\nprohibiting neither Eve nor Adam
\nbut the atomic silence that stipulates me
\nto the millions of stacks of skins I will carry
\ninto the anthology of the incinerated world<\/p>\n

But why slaughter oneself to save just one word hollowed out by termites a house that collapses as
\nsoon as one enters<\/p>\n

I GREET THIS HORSE FALLEN FROM THE PINNACLE
\nANDRE BRETON
\nFROM WHICH POETRY SPRANG LIKE A SPRITE
\nPOETRY MY MORGUE MY SERENITY AND MY SHIPWRECK<\/p>\n

\u00a9\u00a0Editions\u00a0Gallimard,\u00a0Paris,\u00a02009<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Mohammed Kha\u00efr Edd\u00efne & Conor Bracken<\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A poem by Mohammed Kha\u00efr-Edd\u00efne, translated from the French by Conor Bracken. I\u2019m not lamenting this taunted blood but a cast of hawks high as the blood carries its irremediable bill with the sluice where death leans into my eye o sun your crutches shatter now the brief cry of earth clods tossed at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1704,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[58],"tags":[36],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-3Yb","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15263"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1704"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15263"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15369,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15263\/revisions\/15369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}