Dissidence, I

bookmarker
       the bald island hoisting its breasts
      active memory
      its percussions on the high railing
my retina leaning
here a frizzy breaking away    sides along    a slow
measure    the recitative of hopscotch

aerial
      daybreak
            decibel

cracked matrix    I salute you
barbed poets
in you    the palaverous ink
nearest the bars
wears away in new words
in the alphabet of the day
water    labor
            ventriloquistic dread

I

migrant leaping
to survive

my broken flute once more on the alert
at the familiarity of the streets
rusty saliva
I cheat three-times-is-a-charm
the sail of hopscotch courts

ABC primer
a city-rumbling vacillates

the conquered trough
beautiful
to be preserved
      I salute you from Mont-Royal
Florville-palette
Manuel-Mute E    surveyor of Carib languages
Bélance-the-source
lighting
Trouillot-the-sap
Charles christophing caravel-dreams
speak
Chassagne-lamppost
Philoctète of the limping islands
thundering Etienne    fresco on the Dézafi ¹ sea

elsewhere
here
geometry of the bow

I salute you
poets of the sunrise towing the night
the austral jib
the boreal index
      he the numinous son of America
at the noon of voices      Carib dissidence
I am    of the wind    the pregnant mistress
one-armed gestures
a programmed word
o      geographer      tide fording    you seam up
link    and    liana
our mortiferous couplings

undoes the dream
      says the retina

place without a place
obese
an adulterous city
sweats
Tropics in distress

sweats
cadaverous    your hymn    limping
stinks
      Port-aux-Putes ²
impure
your memory    powdered with the shipwreck of shades
drowses
trauma    my wrinkles      childhood at half-mast

Port-aux-Putes
Port-aux-Putes
      bloodless
I love your gall    its deafness
vain suture of premeditated dreams
lone hiccough of a chorale
remains
      here
        my marigraphic dissidence
in a reverent score    my polar viol
grafts its salt

Montreal, Summer 1989

--Translated by Carrol F. Coates

This translation and text are published by permission of the author.

Robert Berrouët-Oriol was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where in 1991 he returned from Canada to work with the media. He is a poet and linguist, and the author of Lettres urbaines [Urban Letters], a collection of poems.

Notes

1. Dézafi is the title of Frankétienne's first novel, in Creole (Port-au-Prince, 1975) [translator's note].

2. Port-aux-Putes: Port of Whores, a play on the name of Haiti's capital [translator's note].

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