Published in Issue 63.4: Fall 2024
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The return to the center sometimes takes detours, passing by
retreating waters, heading towards large mammals, displaced
seeds, a path of straw.
So many days diverted for a shadow.
I wait to recognize a reason, a meaning.
At the boundary: mute hands. In the face: all relief has vanished.
Only the instruments remain.
We live in this place long open to the sky; resting whale in which I trace a world.
Fixing circles in the water, continually inhaling gaze; remembering
the point poised in the action; naming everything with precision.
What is this gentle hand found at the end of the arm this morning?
Poised the way the sky clouds over, gradually.
I distanced myself from mornings, this place of density. Got lost
again in a dawn dressed in horsehair. The unplanted vegetables
stand straight in the essential.
Surprised by this state of absence, where I hold onto the remnants
just to believe I am still in control.
Little shard of heart left lying on the ground.
Not a word, not an action still standing upright. Only emptiness, a
white tablecloth. Migrating butterflies and the tapping of tree
trunks outdoors. I flow outside of the wind. Watching the wasps
drift skyward—the wasps and their duties, their meaning, their
purpose.
What is it that tugs me so, that leaves me distant from the interior
of things?
Every act has a tendency to drown, to pursue sunken territories.
The studio: a silence on which the eyes come to rest.
In them are tree trunks, aborted larvae.
All that lives in the vicinity leaves its mark in the gaze.
Nothing proclaims itself, but is first either silence or hollow.
A fault line inhales the world in its lack.
Here, where my back is to the forest, fog rises at the same time as
abstraction.
At this exact moment, the eye withdraws.
I go by successive exhaustions: of shapes, of motions, of hours.
I exhaust autumn and its crumbs.
I exhaust my strength, the night.
Rinsing the day down to its skeleton.
At the origin of colors: fruit. Then, something emerges from the
haze. Cell linked to the lung. Unless it’s to the stomach.
On the ground, trapped movements, frozen insects.
A moth blends into the concrete. From these suspended lives, I
make my motion.
The eye begins in the circle, lacking all contour but tremor.
Water tries to bring the world with it.
The world directs the sky, directs the falling of leaves.
When sun vanishes, a humid wall blocks the air.
Everything descends: heat, hunger, plants’ sap.
The seasons open a path, movements made with the sky’s support.
How to speak of this passage without uttering the form?
In changing space, I lost light, the infinite body. Yet the same
murmurs, the same absences, remain at play.
We are slow, always running late on our own eyes.
Thought, undoubtedly faster than light, brings the act to where
time has not yet spoken.
I look for the point of rupture and find only scraps, remnants.
Confidences are built on water.
Translated from the French by
Marissa Davis
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Stéphanie Ferrat is a painter and poet from Aix-en-Provence, France, currently residing in the Var. In both her visual and literary art, she expresses a love for and devoted attention to the natural world. Books of her poetry have been published by La Lettre volée, Fissile, and L’atelier La Feugraie. Ferrat has combined her diverse artistic interests in creating her own small press, Les Mains, which publishes intricately illustrated books of poetry.
Marissa Davis is a poet and translator from Paducah, Kentucky. Her translations are published or forthcoming in Modern Poetry in Translation, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Mid-American Review, The Common, Rhino, American Chordata, Northwestern Review, and The Offing. Her full-length debut, End of Empire, is forthcoming in 2025 from Penguin Books. Davis holds an MFA from New York University, and she was a 2023 ALTA Translation Mentorship Fellow.
