Dominique Hecq – Unnamed

Hecq LE P&W February 2025

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing February 2025

Unnamed, poems by Dominique Hecq.


Unnamed

You listen to the black dog in your sleep speaking of dreamscapes
of peril. It lists litanies of murderous melodies that make your
blood boil. The is a fist of kindling scraping your veins running
away from blood clots and/ or fleeing the nightmare’s crumbling
teeth that cripple your mouth. You wake tight-jawed to a wagging
of no no no that’s all there is to contain time.

You limp through murderous alleys, each step marking night’s
forgotten scars down to the underpass where the dog turns to
wolf. Cinder rain pours from eye-sockets. Coats inaudible words.

Your feet walk you past numbered urns to the back of the graveyard
where garbage collectors, roofers and hooligans wild as the
new weather stand next to tiny white crosses with scattered dates
from memory lane. Sleeves rolled up, they tell you how the dead
were born from their blood and bones.

Qué calor la vida. The stink of it.

Now you can see it, the wall. It is crimson and dripping.


Between wolf and dog

Night of furphies. Possums hiss like cats. We tear from the brutalities,
of language, machines, protocols, corollaries, sorority, synchronicity.
Flee human letters and litters, their heady smells, flotsam and jetsam.
I feel not terror but elation. Writhe in my skin. Revert to my wolf
instincts. Howl at the giant moth ball masquerading as moon. Unlike
Ginsberg, I have no teeth. I feed on dust. My saturnian eyes defy,
geography. I pound the ground, dog in tow. We’re off the beaten track.
Prowl the parched wetlands by the obsidian necklace once creek. I
give my dog silence biscuits so he doesn’t starve. The trees people
their bare bones with leathery flesh. They yawn as the morning star
peeps through the clouds’ curls. Bow their heads to distant thunder.
Hum a wordless tune under their breath. Let them remake language
without us.

The dark quenches our thirst for unbridled companionship. Trees
blaze, thrumming around. Hair spiky as an echidna’s ancient coat
spread all over my body, unsettling all idea of time and place. We
reach, the lake/ water hole together. A ripple of nausea surges into
my/ her body. I/ she shakes. Pronouns drop to their knees. Dog, come
back, they rasp. And throw up.

Familiar smell of bat shit on the breeze. I close my eyes on the waning
moon. Come, boy, come, I open my arms wide. The caked mud crackles
under my feet. Dog materialises at my side. Says we must talk about
sticks.

The air’s so muggy its clings. The dog runs his slobbery tongue on my
calves. Let’s go, he says. I’m rooted to the ground.

Leaving. Setting sail for the unknown. We’ve been in leaving mode since
we disembarked in this dead-end world. Leaving without a tour operator.
No craze for nomadism which, in its current forms, is nothing more
than sedentarism in motion. None of this gallivanting that extends its
networks of freewheeling sightings and vacuities of escapades across
continents and seas.

Leaving is something else entirely. It’s jumping in/ out, exiling yourself.
Exsul mentis domusque. Deprived of reason and its home. Where the
prose poem begins.

The dog sits, obdurate as a rock, as if to say agency is a weird word. He’s
anchored in time when I’m already dead. It’s a very strange feeling.
I allow the dead to emerge and again and again, coming back. The
revenants. In this body, these thoughts, this language. I is a clearing
teeming with ghosts, including those who arise from the future. I is a
threshold, portal, a porous space where spectres cross.


© Dominique Hecq

Dominique Hecq is a widely anthologised and award-winning poet, fiction writer, essayist and translator. She lives and works on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land (Naarm/Melbourne). Hecq writes in English and French. Her creative works comprise a novel, six collections of short stories and seventeen books of poetry. Together with Volte Face and Otopos her bilingual sequence, Pistes de rêve appeared in 2024.

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