From the litany of marthe bonnard Poem by Bernard Dewulf

1.
I lie in water, blue-green water not
just bathing. I'm in water
as that's where I exist. See my girlish hips
bloom under water. See me out of the water,
where my weight is a woman's.
Out of the water I don't sway from myself.
I float myself from me - a pale moon
from the body's gravitation.
I lie in water, blue-green water. Don't think,
don't think what I'm doing is just bathing.
I will stay in water till the water
enters into me. Till it is me. And I it.
Until I think like water.



2.
Tell me what's my colour.
He paints me black and blue
until my flesh suits him.

As a thing I form a woman.
I absorb the light and I am silent.

Sometimes I have to sing. His brush then
starts to dance and I stand staggering
an opaque nude
on red, transparent heels
in a whirling, blue-sick bathroom.

Tell me what's my colour.
He paints me yellow and grey,
a canary in dead light.
See, the women-friendly paint
on his claw.
He strokes me like I'm prey.

Yellow's the blush of his grief.
He parties and mourns the light
on my living, parting body.
He soon sees through my colourful corpse.



7.
I lie in water, water pale as death.
Sitting on the bank, in our theatre's slanting light,
my painter.

He outlines me in the draft
of the day. Later he discolours me like ice fish
in a hole.

What he sees occurs nowhere
but in memory of the present. The now swarms past
into the painting.

The way I float, a blotter to the light,
is how it should remain forever.
See him sit, sky-high above me,

a pencil like an ice pick close at hand,
already waiting at my surface
for that one thin moment.

Translation: Willem Groenewegen