Vox Populi
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Pascale Petit: Black Jaguar with Quai Saint-Bernard
Behind the Fauverie a crawl of quayside traffic
while Aramis roars for his food, the air
turbulent as he opens his jaws in a huge
yawn. If I hold my breath, half-close my eyes
and listen hard — there at the tongue’s root,
in the voicebox of night, I might hear
the almost-vanished. He’s summoning his prey,
this lord of thunderbolts, calling to ghosts
of the Lost World, with this evening chant
to scarlet macaw, tapir, golden lion tamarin.
Until everything goes slow and the rush-hour
queue of scale-to-scale cars is one giant caiman
basking on the bank. The jaguar’s all
swimming stealth now — no sound — a stalker
camouflaged by floating hyacinths, senses
tuned only to the reptile of the road. Then, with
one bound, spray scatters like glass, as Aramis
lands on the brute’s back and bites its neck.
~~~
Copyright 2024 Pascale Petit. From Fauverie (Seren, 2014).
Pascale Petit’s poetry collection, Beast, published by Bloodaxe in 2025, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her novel, My Hummingbird Father, was published by Salt in 2024. She has published nine poetry collections, four of which were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Mama Amazonica won the RSL Ondaatje, and Laurel prizes. Her eighth, Tiger Girl, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and Wales Book of the Year.
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As ever and once again I hold my breath to hear the silence and the withheld roar in Pascal Petit’s words…I think…one thinks… that the jungle creatures and colors will be merely gorgeous and evocative and yes seductive…but then comes the leap and the bite of the neck that draws my imagination’s blood and the words become frightening. Good frightening. Once more.
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Beautiful response, Margo — thank you.
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A zoo in the Jardin des plantes was right there above the Quai St Bernard — a place where students loved to sit along the Seine — in the “Quartier Latin” on the left bank of Paris. From there one could hear the lions (and panthers??) roar. I remember that, suddenly, thanks to this poem! This was 58 years ago, in May of 1968 in Paris — as the student upheaval and worker strikes “roared” in the streets of Paris. Trainloads of students from Belgium joined the crowds and many of us “camped” on the quays along the Seine…
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beautiful memory, Laure-Anne. Thanks for this.
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I am absolutely breathless with the juxtapositions of our daily, the wild, the imagined, the gentle: “Until everything goes slow and the rush-hour queue of scale-to-scale cars is one giant caiman basking on the bank. The jaguar’s all swimming stealth now — no sound — a stalker camouflaged by floating hyacinths, senses tuned only to the reptile of the road.”
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beautiful!
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This lovely stalking-poem puts me in the quayside queue of Pascale Petit. Aramis is no longer a musketeer, but a stealthy jungle hunter, a poetic being ready to pounce among us readers in the floating hyacinth realms. There are certain brutes we all know, just ripe for his bite. Not this pig.
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not this pig. thank you, Phil Levine.
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Oh, my, Pascale. The wildness of the world survives in your poetry.
If I hold my breath, half-close my eyes
and listen hard — there at the tongue’s root,
in the voicebox of night, I might hear
the almost-vanished.
We’re listening with you.
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Yes, Pascale teaches me how to see and how to listen.
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The Lost World: By a Shaman—Poet I begin to perceive whats missing—long disappeared. To know what was here, as none of us now can know gives Pascal power we lack. She still sees them, she can tell us who we are by our loss. Save by her, how would we ever know?
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Yes, how would we know?
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