Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume One November-December 2024
Bâton de marche en France, poem by Anne M Carson.
Bâton de marche en France
It can’t be
helped
the hip is
coming to
the end of
its life
lasting far
beyond its
anticipated
remit Saucer-
shaped hips like
mine often
don’t last
twenty years
Mine has held
onto its femur
faithfully for
nearer seven
decades than
six although
it has enlisted
muscles and
tendons in place
of bone to stop
my leg falling
off This
acetabulum
has been a good
hip always
able in yoga to
splay abnormally
wide But this
joint has done
all the splaying
it was given to
do Now I limp
around France
first Paris then
on a stick in Lyon
It helps I’d be
lying if I said
it didn‘t hurt
that it isn’t hard
but many live
with worse
My hip is on
borrowed
time I am
grateful I am
alive and
have a hip
still carrying
my weight
letting me
pivot and turn
sit and stand
I tack the phrase
ma hanch est
mauvaise
gratuitously
to the end of
an exercise
today in
French class
demonstrating
with a certain
panache that
my mauvaise
hip and I for
now continue
to vivre
ensemble
© Anne M Carson
Anne M Carson is an Australian poet, essayist and visual artist whose poetry has been published internationally, and widely in Australia, receiving numerous awards including Commended in the Ada’s (2024) and shortlisting in the SWW NSW 2024. The Detective’s Chair: prose poems about fictional detectives was published Liquid Amber Press (2023). Her PhD, awarded in 2023, was awarded an Outstanding Dissertation Prize from the Visual and Performing Arts SIG of the American Educational Researchers Association in 2024.