Anne M Carson – Bâton de marche en France

Carson LE P&W 1 Nov-Dec 2024

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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.

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