#MeToo: Zoë Skoulding

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.