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Texts on my painting

by Roland Buraud

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In the last song

In the last song

In the last song

I don't know.
I like crossings.
The deaf dives.
Silence.

For a long time, music was my substitute for words I listened to,
but then it was Mozart opening the earth
under the feet of Don Giovanni,
Mahler in the last song, Pergolesi the child angel,
and this stubborn suspension of time
in the second movement of Shubert's Quintet.

It seemed like silence was about to die out,
they seemed like gestures without a cry,
screams without the space where the echo will play them,
thickness without fullness and time without latency.

Almost nothing that engulfs me and that is taken from me
and that I unfold with the acute awareness that History is at stake here,
that here Art says the words of man in its repeated sequence,
convulsive and compulsive,
perfecting its survival strategies,
displaying his grins, dissecting his rites,
and decorating his mourning.

Shortness of breath is infinite. Who do I start over? Where do I finish?
The painting does not respond.

She offers, by pointing to the void,
the warmth of a cold kiss.

Pascal Payen-Appenzeller, the poet, the friend, will here put down the words that I failed to say.


He read them to me, crying, that Sunday in November. He stood
very early in the morning.

Coffee.

Roland Buraud

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©2025 by Etienne Buraud

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