Touch To Affliction

Nathalie Stephens

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9781552451755
• eBook ISBN: 9781770562264
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Touch to Affliction is a text of ruins: ruins of genre, of language, of the city, of the body, of the barbarism of the twentieth century. At once lament, accusation and elegy, this work articulates the crumbling of buildings, the evisceration of language, the inhumanity that arises from patrie.

Acclaimed poet Nathalie Stephens walks among these ruins, calling out to those before her who have contemplated atrocity: Martin Buber, Henryk Górecki, Simone Weil. In the end, this work considers what we are left with – indeed, what is left of us – as both participants in and heirs to the twentieth century.

Touch to Affliction is political but never polemical. It lives at the interstices of thought and the unnameable. It is a book for our times.

My Thigh Grew a City

I went into a new city with old words.

A river swallowed a lake. An iron bridge swerved and hooked the sky. The names of streets scattered.

Three held passion.

I bit into a wooden rail. Water rose to where I stood. A strangulated swamp and gold and granite. Books.

I carried a small body in my teeth.

Claim nothing as your own. Not curvature. Nor comfort. Nor sleep.

I wanted fracture. I wanted fleeting. I wanted feign. The city bore into bone. The wound opened onto sound. The sound echoed and echoed into the small body and cringing hands and settled on a stone step and I said nothing. ‘Nothing.’ Wept.

Inside memory is little worth keeping. Matchsticks. Some loose change. And the frayed edges of your city. Frayed because of memory. I am trying not to touch it too often, nor imagine it too fiercely.

Inside memory is the failure of memory. I go there and come upon my arrogance at wanting the thing that language won’t offer. What your language says as distinctly as mine. What is wanting. What is reach. Language does not beckon. It scoffs. Inside your city with its vengeful rivers and wrought bridges. When it says ‘I love,’ it knocks holes into the riverbed.

We will drown in the city and we will take our languages with us.

Desire is not a measure for speaking. One man leans into another man and this man catches the first in a quiet embrace. The street sounds dissipate. The smokestacks cough rings into the city. The rail lines buckle and break.

I am that man and I am both leaning and not leaning.

The city is this city.

The train is late.

I wait for the tall light to amber. I listen to the feather weight of fall. I reach into the bone collapse of grief. And the stranger reach for me.

My eyes move from the man’s mouth to the orange sky.

The city catches fire.

And we are in it.

§

The body is small and familiar.

It is a small body and it is familiar (to me).

I sit near the body with my hands placed on the small chest and the small back. I warm the cold legs. I stroke the small head. The eyes are wide with fear. The eyes are wide with fear.

With fear.

In your language, to attach a word to a thing is to resist the thing.

Instead I touch it with my hands until my hands are thick with touching and the colour is gone from the eyes and the head twitches and my hands are noise and trembling until the wind pushes the door and the wood marks bruises on my wrists and my wrists snap and the fingers come to rest against the insides of my arms and my knees burrow into concrete and the small body becomes heavy and the lungs expel liquid and the heaving moves from the body into the room and the window on the door shatters and the heart hooks into the ribs and the blood drains from the face and the clay runs down the wall and the house hunches against the earth and the jaw cracks and the animals are silent and the air twitches and a dog refuses food and a machine whirs and a river overflows and the thing catches me not sleeping.

§

Do you notice that it is dusk every time we look into the city?

That two hands pressed eagerly against a glass pane are a form of scripture. That the impression left by a city is carved from bone. That the language of a city is a language that mourns. And inside mourning are two lips mouthing no words and they swallow the city whole. You call this faith. I call this savagery. An...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Le Poème Affligé
• My Thigh Grew a City
• Not Paris
• Finitude Lamentation
• Broyer as with Centuries or Meat
• We Are Accountable for What We Aren't Told
• The Scarceness of the Body Architecture's Scorn
• NOS LANGUES SONT INCOMMENSURABLES ET MEURTRIÈRES
• Notes and Acknowledgements
• About the Author