Three poems by Nathalie Stephens
Selections from "Aller-Retour"
iii
Where bodies collide with loss in the in between places of denial and want
and the weighted fragment of identity. I have measured the pauses
between words and the register of skin to touch, where history's
clinging smell is the disclosure of fear. This impulse to hold what
eludes me is the need to trust the haunted cells of my body, where each
violation is entrapped in the swollen heat of desire and the imposition
of distance. Those unchosen places revisited in brief moments of
hesitation on subway platforms and street corners, the unearthed cities
of past lives caught in the violent tremours of sleep.
vii
The end of the line, an uphill trudge to a cobblestone square and the
streets all look the same. The suburban claim to stillness is a
landscape of unchanging wills, its very design and treachery. Childhood
summers spent planning elaborate escapes in French and Jewish, small
explosions like blood on my legs and the tug of freedom, this trek away
from my requisite ancestry.
The submersion of desire is the body's escape route into itself, the
departure of faith and the mind's elaborate demise. Is there a yet
unspoken language? The challenge to the skin's vessels is the spirit's
unwavering ability to plot its own course.
viii
Distance's appeal is the promise of separation. The traveller's lie is
her belief in runways and railway tracks, the unmarked map which awaits
her in vinyl lounges and untimely delays. I have read the books before
me and found poetry to be its own mystery, no guidebook for the hidden
spirit, with only my hands to mould new versions of eternity.
I am Camus' Etranger, mocking life's designated passions, the steel
bars of discipline like the enforcement of lineage and ugliness. In the
delineation of inside and out the gaps between walls, those dusty places
where some girls live in hiding, grazed knees and all. Is there an echo
worth answering? The trebled pitch of grief ground into itself, the
incantations of enforced senility. In dreams I lie awake, hovering over
chasms of waiting bodies.
Nathalie Stephens was
born in Montreal and raised in Toronto and Lyon (France). Now a bilingual
Canadian author, she has penned three poetic narratives -
Colette m'entends-tu? (TROIS, 1997), This Imagined Permanence (Gutter
Press, 1996), Hivernale (GREF, 1995) - and a forthcoming novel (TROIS,
1999). Her texts appear regularly in North American journals, including
The Fiddlehead, Canadian Woman Studies, Parchment, Bridges, This
Magazine and 13th Moon. The above three poems are excerpted from an unpublished manuscript entitled
"Aller-Retour," and appeared first in the 1997-1998 issue of
Parchment: Contemporary Canadian Jewish Writings.
You can write to her c/o nath@ican.net
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