One and Many

(Singulières et Plurielles)

COLETTE NYS-MAZURE



RADIANT


She is a daughter of joyousness, running headlong into life, unfurling the banner of each hour, a woman poised for flight. Her ringing laughter greets each day and her breath is fresh as sprouting grass when dawn shivers in. We might try to hold her back. The length of an embrace, a shared page, a morsel of bread broken. Already she vanishes on the cusp of summer. Leaving us to find our way in her shining wake
(translated by Judy Cochran)
.

LOVED-LOVING

 She is woman of raw silk. Porous to the touch of knowing, tender hands.A woman of hills and valleys, of leaves and moss.A winding spiral of desire. Sweetness of sap, fluidity, dizzying dismemberment. She is torn apart, rejoined. A faraway woman to be saluted, seized. A presence to knead, taste, savor. A woman of loving spaces steeped in honey and intimate shadows, of proud bearing, of secret raptures. Hoarse and gleaming in the rumble of imminent pleasure. Jubilant beat of drums.
(translated by Judy Cochran)

THE POET'S KITCHEN

 All you will see in the night kitchen, seated beneath the harsh, hummingneon, is a woman writing. Her plate, three glasses and the left-overs have been pushed aside and the place where her notebook lies, wiped clean.The wind outside might be wailing, frightening; waves of rain might becleaving to the blinded concrete; the snow doubtless ripening in the cold,stars looking spiked; or is the heinous darkness clasping the universe inits steel fist.
She bows her head like those in pain or in thought, but if you peer overher shoulder, you might discover beneath the pencil darting between the lines, the spuming waves, the caress of a face, a tree transfixed bysummer, your own fears described. She grabs life by the throat, the witch with her limber words in order to make it chock up its soul and images.
She is simply a woman slicing a large portion of poetry from the piping hot bread of life.
(translated by Judy Cochran)

Undecided

 Oscillating. Ambiguous body. Uneasy adolescence adrift in bountiful territories. Assailed by doubts, she suspects she cannot truly exist outside her mother's eyes. Turmoils, fury. Barely out of childhood, she is thrown as fodder to wolves, to dogs. Pouting lips of a disappointed child and arrogant hips of a woman. Hands sticky with sweets, but behind the mascara, a cunning gaze. In a pirouette she dismisses her youthful beauty and rushes outdoors to be schooled by the trees.
(Translated by Renée Linkhorn)

Transformed

 Childhood, within her, lingers and bleeds. The pulpous, violent one. In day by day emptiness, echoes of this well-worn sun. If words did not keep humming ceaselessly, did not become inscribed in her, her body would sway towards this original spring. When rain falls more steady on the turbulent garden, other summer showers come back to her. They would interrupt the children's games in the open fields, make them rush, excited and drenched, to the shed, the stifling barn or the vast walnut trees. What happiness then, without equal and without cause! Why is today's rain nothing more than just water? Dull nostalgia. Yet in those dawning days there lies a mystery: the boredom of being, the panic, the troubled quest already loomed then, as she remembers. How is it they did not lead to despair? Undivided, childhood beckons from across the years. Not so much a paradise lost, she hopes, as a promised land.
(Translated by Renée Linkhorn)

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