A DEFENSE OF POETRY Poem by Pierre Alféri

That happens
Here
Between the acute sensation and the latent feeling
Entering you
Troubled the old game of both soul
And landscape
So I really need you if I'm to advance.

What joy to see you walking over
My territory, exchanging a few
Insignificant words in passing with the garden
Gnomes. Human figures had become silent
In the constructed part of the domain
On the boundary an aged man barely held
Anyone's attention as he cut the end off a banana
Bearing a barcode with a Swiss penknife.
Yes, from the first sensation
The visible side announces the colour
The code of the day: the nature
Of its link with what's hidden. That happens
Here, not in the ‘un-said'
But between the views of the moment
Of the area all completely accurate
And what they cover up is what must be said.
A hydraulic jack supports the gallery
I lean on it, I test its resistance
On each line. Each line measures
The distance between the décor
The record set up and its shadow
Inventory you lay down in writing -
Between the acute sensation and the latent feeling, enters
Between. But this capricious proportion that rules
My unhealthy flow, rhythms it, gets it going
Had frozen in the usual places. A whole area
Invaded by the desert and its cold nights
And its mad-wind-that-no-one-listens-to-expecting-to-get-away-with-it.
The same set-up: the gaze of regulars who avoid each other
Preferring to hand back the change of words in profile
Walls and floor polished darkly by daydreams
For daydreams, sketches rehearsed a thousand times
Before an audience of chairs. Entering you
Troubled the old game of both soul
And landscape. The air you displace when you walk
Has re-swollen the card figures that belong here.
- That leaves us with quite a lot of images
Doesn't it? What was last night's TV drama about?
I didn't even get if it was a docudrama
Or something else. - Yes, everything's getting muddled up this morning
Or rather juxtaposed, one view bang another
Unequal doses of sun, passers-by, cars, cement
That nothing links except the analogy whose logic
Vanishes into the next vision. - I hope at least
That when sewing them together you understand more clearly
What they're hiding in your poor little head.
- In two words I call that the sentimental
So I really need you if I'm to advance
From one comparison to the other ironically
Naively in this indirect light
This ‘reality' that quotes itself
And moves away. Because behind it, far behind
Realism and imagination stand around
In a mortal docudrama. - That's all?
- That's all, I've said too much, it's your fault.
Now let's change terrace
Let's look for silence but outside.

Translation: Kate Campbell