TRAMINISCENCES Poem by Pierre Alféri

There were
octrois
cabarets
slums
factories
film studios
are still
warehouses
silos
cement works
canals

The track lines and splits
the frost of a past left
incompletely masked in the no
man's land and now the memories
trapped in the suburban limbo
prisoners of a transit zone
spatter flutter wandering souls
freed from their amber beads
innocuous zombies stuck
to the window they hurtle down obliquely
with the raindrops are we
under attack from the people of memory
the works have accidentally exhumed?
isn't it just the violent tremor
caused by the excavation of section
T3 that briefly caused a movement of

TRAMINISCENCE?

a tent
a portable stove

an eighteen year-old seamstress
eyes on her work

a boy pulling a cart

cats with eyes wet
with coryza

a schoolgirl in clumpy shoes

an old bearded man lying flat
on a great coat

a wounded soldier
with his medals

a young black worker

children running wild as if streets
were forests

a Sunday gardener

a robust old lady

two mechanics in blue
with moustaches

aunt Isabelle, who only discovered Paris aged thirteen, at the Liberation, back from Egypt where the family had no news of her father during the four years of occupation, walked with her best friend Catherine every Sunday around the old fortifications, completing, or so she said, several complete circuits of the city, but in disconnected sections that she never managed to link clearly in her mind, because already the works - destruction of the last bastions, diggings, then the périphérique tarmacked - were changing, from month to month and even week to week, the landscape

La Chapelle is a village
on a hill known for its mills
the way Belleville
Montmartre Ménilmontant
are for their vines

and yet most
of the events that affect us
most strongly leave no physical trace
or barely an alley lit for a fraction
of a second among the synapses a puff
of smoke dissipated by a gust
of wind the imagination alone
- or what remains of it in a deep coma
overtaken by events
far more powerful than any image -

inscribes emotions
in the cement the stone
the earth the glass

giving them

the three dimensions

of a


décor




disturbing the earth
frees the dead

a gas
the past briefly escapes

dissipates


the presidential suite
of the bank is a raised
jetty the desk
a capsule overlooking
the canal where
grain-loaded barges passed
the only flux followed there
now: that of the stock exchange

Translation: Kate Campbell