Zoë Skoulding
from Teint: for the Bièvre (Swansea: Hafan Books, 2016)
The Bièvre today represents the most perfect symbol of feminine misery exploited by a large city. […] Like many country girls, the Bièvre fell prey, upon her arrival in Paris, to the industrial snares of touts; despoiled of her dresses of grass and adornments of trees, she had to set to work immediately and wear herself out with the terrible chores demanded of her. Surrounded by rough merchants who pass her daily, but, by common agreement, imprison her in turn the length of her banks, she has become a tannery worker, and, day and night, she washes the filth from stripped skins, soaks the spare fleeces and raw leather, suffers the grip of alum, the bite of lime and caustic. There you see her in the evenings behind Gobelins, in a foul-smelling sludge, alone, trampling in the mud, by moonlight, crying, dazed with fatigue, under the miniscule arch of a little bridge.
– J.K. Huysmans, La Bièvre, 1914.
I
Not a river but its
shadow harmonics hidden
level in the glass note
glissando between a
movement and a sound
half in the performance
where I ran to you I
ran as tainted water
while tarmac shines in rain
the channels you don’t touch
well up on tomorrow’s
tongue to flower there don’t
leave or was it this way
that now I’ll run from you
IV
Not drowning but buried
the lost body always
hers always innocent
already filthy her
live arm absent from dead
arm lifting hydraulic
weight to feed the mills
diverted into sewers
this slow disappearance
into age a reason
to sink in concrete what
you can’t face you never
could only call back in
song to the safely dead
V
Not wormwood but stream of
piss so says Rabelais
six thousand and fourteen
dogs went howling after
the woman in crimson
Panurge couldn’t charm so
his revenge a river
of dog-desire maddened
by scent the dogs all came
at once they pissed on her
they pissed at her door in
streams of bitter water
this territory marked her
satin asking for it
Panurge had no sooner spoke this but all the dogs that were in the church came running to this lady with the smell of the drugs that he had strewed upon her, both small and great, big and little, all came, laying out their member, smelling to her, and pissing everywhere upon her—it was the greatest villlainy in the world. […] When she was entered into the house and had shut the door upon herself, all the dogs came running of half a league round, and did so well bepiss the gate of her house that there they made a stream with their urine wherein a duck might very well have swimmed, and it is this same current that now runs at St Victor, in which Gobelin dyeth scarlet, for the specifical virtue of these piss-dogs […].
– François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel II Chap. XXII, 1534, trans. Thomas Urquhart and Peter Anthony Motteux 1693.