Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Like a Hand at the Moment of Death
Translated from the French by Stuart Dischell
Like a hand at the moment of death and shipwreck
it rises like the last beams of the setting sun,
so from all places your glances spring.
There is not enough time, there is not enough time
perhaps for me to see,
But the leaf that falls and the wheel that turns you
will say nothing is perpetual above earth,
Except love,
And I want to be convinced.
Some salvage boats paint reddish colors,
Some storms vanish,
And old waltz that sweeps away time and the wind
during slow intervals of sky.
Scenery.
Me, I don’t want the others who clasp at what I aspire
And kill the rooster’s song.
Like a hand at the moment of death it shrinks, my
heart strains.
I will never cry because I know you.
I love my love too much to cry.
You will cry over my grave.
Or me over yours.
It won’t be too late.
I’ll lie. I’ll say you were my mistress,
And then it really is so useless,
You and me, soon we will die.
Robert Desnos (1900–1945) was a French Surrealist poet. He is credited with eight volumes of poetry and the film L’Étoile de Mer, in collaboration with artist Man Ray. Much of his poetry has also been set to music. (6/2010)
Stuart Dischell is the author of Children with Enemies (University of Chicago Press, 2017), as well as Good Hope Road, a 1991 National Poetry Series Selection (Viking, 1993); Evenings & Avenues (Penguin, 1996); Dig Safe (Penguin, 2003); and Backwards Days (Penguin, 2007). Dischell’s poems have been published in journals such as The Atlantic, The New Republic, AGNI, Slate, The Kenyon Review, and in anthologies including Essential Pleasures, Hammer and Blaze, The Pushcart Prize, and Good Poems. A recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at University of North Carolina Greensboro. He is a contributing editor of AGNI. (updated 4/2019)
Dischell’s first full-length collection Good Hope Road was reviewed in AGNI 40 by Joseph Lease.
Dischell’s collection Evenings & Avenues was reviewed in AGNI 46 by George Weld.