"Drift Und Drang" (Pierre Joris)

"Drift Und Drang"

(Pierre Joris)

that man-shaped tree trunk

on the rocks at lowtide

borders the narrows,

at hightide the day

before it beat its wooden

semblance on those

same rocks — the twin

branches imitating legs

submerged, the pin-

head angled up, banging

on the rocks at algae

level.

   the twist has stayed

with me these three

days, the anthropos slowly

washed up, washed out.

----------------------------------

“you can(’t) go it alone,” the

vagrant, vagabond, give me a

v-sign, double it to go

wandering,

                   leave the medulla,

slip between pyramid &

\peduncle,

            (the letters go

backwards) from jugular

to carotid, down down, afferent all

the way.

to count the shlup of

viscera. Lets you know

how your gut

gets its

gut feeling.

"Drift Und Drang" by Pierre Joris appears online at N/A, "a journal where nothing applies."    Joris has written more than forty books (poetry, essays and translations) while also teaching at SUNY Albany. He's translated Picasso and Kurt Schwitters into English, Kerouac and Corso, Pete Townshend and Sam Shepard into French. In 2010/2011 he published Paul Celan: The Meridian (Stanford University Press), Exile is my Trade: The Habib Tengour Reader (Black Widow Press), and The Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj (poems). And, of course, he blogs at his page, Nomadics. He translates "...Because I have to, because if I and everybody else don’t translate the world will be a way shittier place than it already is. ... "