Léon Pradeau

Down where your smell is june at night, quest into the mountains.
listen to the accents of people stepping out of rvs. feeling the air
of them & then together hum and modify. you can diphtongue
with me, no southern speak, it goes: on, un, an. éon. sein, sang,
son.

Can you hear it? as the mountain shades us, control your breath,
utter, it goes. remember, no words are without life. watch
climbers on mountain: esp their hands, with nerves and crimp.
each is inseam, like paths, we learn.

Then off to “the oldest dust of it,” if we go down to rural. empty
roads, nothing but language and the a/c. language roving past
corn and flags the possibility of smiling mouth & gun. they have
what we need at the county fair. you mention funnel cakes or
rides. I said no here, look. the plan is to explore the [ʁ] &
consequential trail. off to a demolition deʁby, true heart of tongue
& cʁadle of the cʁash.

It’s a secret language mission. red necks and 2nd amendment shirts
floqués that mean ʃeʁi, nusɔmsyʁvɛje. call this my content-based
approach. against gʁammaʁ, diʁectly applicable mateʁial. visual,
crashcourse language. just talking, stressing the ʁ’s as we go
along, yet discrete. not to sound foreign, or anything, but?

For we tire at times where everyone and speech, it feels like
rowing dust. wanted my shape to be the french of this life, a.n.
whispers, “livre, that means I.” not to teach you a code, but hints
of non-discursive floors. stripping the shawl of ʁhétorique &
national aura. moods of a french silence, a skill we have & inherit.
mimic a sigh, a gesture of the hand. go with me: pfff [...] ba:. [...]
bo:. [...] mmmh. mwɛ... pretend with me indifference: close your
eyes, brows up, & shoulders: open your lips on left, breathe out.

So I’m working in the mornings to make love, functional &
crafted by concretely, flock my words a wrangle. wake up and give
you these, paper roses with a drop of, french perfume: tell me
what they do! smell like? paper, because they are made of paper.
Take a hike & come see, here’s June going nonverbal again,
yearning to, statebound, utopian shuttle for every feeling heard.
making life and call, my only grammar the code of your look at me
with night and smile

Out there a teʁʁain vague is strange and capacious, unknown
adversaries. roads up in montana. lost towns in the ozarks, you
took me everywhere. which features elected in the portrait, wish
I could dance it. writing I’d love you all night and this is what I
do. And for words abound over this smell of states in perception
without you,

“Coaxed of, myself but being not that. Mais je me / sentirais plus
/ à l’aise avec les mots de toi / si c’était / for these / are the / états
où quelques mots sont vrais. / Are words / and not myself”

Is where I lost you,

was it?

Léon Pradeau is a poet and translator based in Chicago. He is the founding editor of Transat', a journal of poetry and poetics in French and English. This poem is an excerpt of "This is it", coming out this spring with Antiphony.