FRANÇOIS LUONG
The Rusty Toque | Issue 11 | Poetry | November 30, 2016
from The Glass TransitionThe house
with the bolted doors has no doors, the speed of a measureless statement. ~ Emmanuel Hocquard, The Invention of Glass I.
No matter what the image shifts as it goes through and against the surface the green cab idling at the traffic light the couple drinking on the other side of the window the deli clerk across the street distances and what is etched into the eye favoring another direction sense impressions if not for At the line between
the outside and what has no shape and yet stands against two angles the angles occurring with each passage and a permanent architecture and shifts with the hour morning and past sunset The passersby the crowds the painted words defining the use of what is enclosed here No memories we kept here The pixelated blur
of the woman’s face saturated with red hues bounces through and against the surfaces lining the streets as she smiles and fades from the pentile matrix of a display with an unknown origin crisscrossed by the rushed trajectories of rootless logo names and designs liquid names vibrating with windowpanes a game of mirrors standing against the city from within the city Two panes at an angle
acting as half-mirror carry the exterior in and back out a game of splits and bouncing back the clock or the image of a clock half-stops against the surface and through shimmering over the two women in saturated hues standing on the other side What the clock gives to the windowpane Opening into and out of
where the image goes all depends on the curvature of the cut convex to widen the size of a hand or so he said a hairline facture distills the beam into its component waves hues penetrating and never entering at once Going through without so much as a push In the early hours
of evening how this empty room enclosed within panes of glass fills up with silhouettes on the move lets the skyline in and out again concrete asphalt glass against glass passersby split as if one could measure in such way the divided image Always in a straight line
if not for the deformities of the material of the impurities therein so goes the beam the image a function of metallic precipitates stopped in transition liquid Dust bonds onto the reflection of flattened landscapes wrapping around trinkets hanging over passages This enclosure opening into What is not captured
in the end is what the material does and does not permit what is enclosed and what is allowed to escape distances and depth wave or particle translucent reflections with no point of origin In the absence of an underlayer it all scatters through and away a history of reduction that can’t be fixed Then if not for what
penetrates and rebounds against the surface a rusted fire escape the ridged spines of cell towers how it breaks and scatters all depends on the rigidity of what is described fault lines within layers after layers heat and pressure determine the arrangement of parts Here a tangent may break to give shape to a letter |
Originally from Strasbourg, France, FRANÇOIS LUONG currently lives in San Francisco, California, where he writes, translates, draws, and designs. With Geneva Chao, he is the translator of Nicolas Tardy’s Encrusted on the Living (LX Press, 2016). He has also translated the works of Esther Tellermann, François Turcot, Hector Ruiz, and other poets from France and Québec. His work has otherwise appeared in Open Letter, dandelion, New American Writing, Aufgabe, Verse, and elsewhere.
Photo by Adam J. Silverman
Photo by Adam J. Silverman
