Pip: osoparavos.com, where the poetry arrives like a stranger at a crossroads — beautiful, unsettling, and not entirely sure it wants to explain itself.
Mara: Today we’re spending the whole episode with a single piece — or rather, a diptych — by Adam Donaldson Powell. Two poems under one title, two encounters with a gibbet, and two completely different registers for confronting what hangs in the air between beauty and dread.
Pip: Let’s start with the gallows.
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Le Gibet: Two Poems, One Shadow
Mara: The title “le gibet” means the gallows, and Powell gives us that image twice — once in raw, street-level French prose, once in formal verse. The question each poem is answering is the same: what does a human mind do when it stumbles into something it cannot process?
Pip: The first poem doesn’t ease you in. It opens in a bar or a gutter — hard to say which — with a woman who is already halfway somewhere else. The speaker sets the scene in one short clause, then drops us straight into it: “Elle pendue, tranquille… et moi qui kiffe trop longtemps avant d’la décrocher.”
Mara: That line — “she hanged, calm… and me who lingers too long before taking her down” — is the gut-punch the whole first poem builds toward. The speaker isn’t horrified. He’s fascinated, and he knows it, and that self-indictment is the point.
Pip: The register is deliberate: slang, ellipsis, broken syntax. “Moi j’ai suivi, comme un con fasciné” — I followed, like a fascinated idiot. It’s the diction of someone who doesn’t trust polished language to tell the truth about ugly feelings.
Mara: The second poem, “Le Gibet II,” shifts everything. Formal stanzas, classical French prosody, a young woman gathering blackberries in sunlit woods. The world has “the taste of fruit and joy,” and then the path turns.
Pip: And there it is — the same image, but earned differently. Where the first poem gives you the shock in a single slap, the second poem makes you walk the whole forest path before you see what’s hanging there.
Mara: What the second poem does that the first doesn’t is trace the aftermath. After the encounter, the woman’s mind does something precise: “L’esprit, pour ne pas choir dans son propre incendie, recouvre l’épouvante d’une étrange maîtrise, comme un lac figé net sous la glace durcie.” The mind covers terror with a strange mastery, like a lake frozen hard under the ice.
Mara: That’s not healing. Powell is careful about that. He calls it “une paix sans chaleur” — a warmth-less peace — and says plainly that this cold rest “ne console pas.” It doesn’t console. It just holds.
Pip: So the diptych form is doing real work. One poem catches the witness at the moment of fascination; the other follows the witness out of the forest and into the long aftermath. Together they map the full arc of an encounter with death that the mind cannot metabolize cleanly.
Mara: And the blackberries come back at the end — their taste on her fingers, long after she’s left the trees. The poem closes on that: the memory embedded in the body, the cold that remains, the silence that “retains the misfortune” when the mind is too exhausted to fight it directly.
Pip: Two poems, one shadow, and no tidy resolution. That’s the diptych.
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Mara: What stays with me is the precision of that frozen-lake image — the mind’s survival mechanism described without any comfort attached to it.
Pip: Beauty and dread sharing the same branch. We’ll be back when the next poems arrive.
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