Issue 6

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Poetry

Bridge Passed
by Pierre Martory

Translated by John Ashbery

The bridge once passed
My city shows its wrinkles
Deep furrows always empty streets
Dead shops drawn shutters
It's the face it used to have
In the days when witches died
When from slow boats Negroes
In red shirts disembarked
To dissolve in the nights
And impregnated the young virgins
And made the boys dream
Of impossible adventures
It's the face it put on
In July nineteen forty
When young half-naked Aryans
Machine guns at their shoulders
Intoned the Horst Wessel song
And struck echoes from the walls
Of the never-violated city
Memories lived or learned
Flow together this Sunday
Like the waters of the two rivers
And evening descends slowly
Until night along the embankment
Lights a few streetlamps
Whose reflection at the base of the bridge
Inducted me as a child
Into impossible dreaming

Flow together this Sunday

Pierre Martory (1920-1998) was drama and music critic of Paris-Match for more than twenty years. A selection of his poems, The Landscapist, translated by John Ashbery, is forthcoming from Sheep Meadow Press.

Read more in Issue 6

Debt
Politics Is a Craft
Politics Is a Craft: Part Two
The Cold, Cold Water
Poetry Bridge Passed by Pierre Martory
Coyote
From the Hills of Fauquier County