PIERRE JORIS           
            

PLAYING THE PERCENTAGES

‘83% of poetry is not worth reading… 
but the other 17% I couldn’t live without’
says Billy Collins, US poet laureate.
To which it would be all too easy to reply,
‘83% of Billy Collins’ poetry is not worth reading… 
the other 17% I can live without,’
so better not say it.



L’HEURE BLEUE

is the hour when the night
birds have fallen
silent,
	& the birds
of day do not
yet stir

	a blue silence, night’s oldest
	a blue hour, the coming day’s youngest
hour, the
		not-yet-day’s premonition, a per-
fume against the brain,
	the benjamin
of hours, smells of gum benzoïn, of benjoïn, gum
		Benjamin,

(not blue in itself,
	white or yellowish
		crystal compound

the name adrift as ever as they all are
	this one from Arabic
		luban jawi (frankincense from

	Java, from far into this night, into
the blue of this hour, you are the oxygen
of this blue hour

C14 H12 O2 

O two Oh you,
Oxygen for two
		Blue hour of me and you

deturn Shri Jayadeva’s hymn 
to Krishna’s love making

«With Benjamin, the resin, trace

a sign on the perfect brows….
Between her two breasts,
cups of the firmament,
the pearls of her necklace

invoke the zodiac.
	But the milky way
		Is drawn by
Krishna’s sap
			

in the blue hour
	he is the bee
		he eats her honey
			his torso thrown back

he says to her:
	“Come, trample my heart.”
(may they bring thus to an end
the errors of this Kali Yuga! 



Done now.

I have never
written a poem

with the word
fraught in it.