Pierre Alferi, p.9



Fifth room. For sense turns, gathers
by whirling things the energy it throws around,
their mental albedo. Really, I’m beginning to doubt
that this expected place exists.
My room in a palace
looked from one side onto a fountain. The window,
closed, became a height of light and pines,
distance of three Gallic slaves cut out on the sky.
Open, curtain of canvas swollen like a sail, and wind.
Inhabiting or haunting, host or ghost can be used
to describe you like the bright rectangle on the yellow wall,
the powdery white outline left on the gravel by a car
gone after the storm.
On the other side, on a foot bridge
of unsteady boards from which descended a metal stairway,
bent and plunging to the basement via stone steps.
Vertigo, too, comes from a part that spins.
Because there was, from one room to another,
no communication. The former residents
mostly met each other in passageways.
Leaving
too fast to leave completely: a painter in the alley,
a very young woman at the back of the library,
an empress of intrigues in the woods, suicides.
Will time suffice, monetary erosion, to make
evanescents of us all, moved in by some corporation
to furnish depreciated monuments,
architectural digest, of which it would leave us the usufruct
as if to a mendicant order, so that they may glean
a surplus value of ghosts, a hysterical aura?
Those who through antiphrasis are called presences,
yet you sought their company. Only a few
parasites on the line, and you thought you were being bugged.

The fifth act is to sort out the silhouettes and
shape them into a wreath. They are formed by ricochets
in every direction like endless connotations,
bridge from one thing and from one word to another. As for
myself, I exist no more than this shadow brewer of a place.