French Poems

For Anne and Rodrigo Moynihan
	 
                                  I.
	The sources of these things being very distant
	It is appropriate to find them, which is why mist
	And night have “affixed the seals” to all the ardor
	Of the secret of the search.  Not to confound it
	But to assure its living aeration.
	 
        And yet it is more in the mass
	Of the mist that some day the same contacts
	Will be able to unfold.  I am thinking of the dance of the
	Solid lightning flashes under the cold and
	Haughty sky all striated with invisible marblings.
	 
        And it does seem that all the force of
	The cosmic temperature lives in the form of contacts
	That no intervention could resolve,
	Even that of a creator returned to the desolate
	Scene of this first experiment: this microcosm.
	 
                               II.
	 All kinds of things exist, and, what is more,
	Specimens of these things, which do not make themselves known.
	I am speaking of the laugh of the squire and the spur
	Which are like a hole in the armor of the day.
	It’s annoying and then it’s so natural
 
        That we experience almost no feeling
	Except a certain lightness which matches
	The recent closed ambiance which is, besides,
	Full of attentions for us.  Thus, lightness and wealth.
	 
        But the existence of all these things and especially
	The amazing fullness of their number must be
	For us a source of unforgettable questions:
	Such as: whence does all this come? and again:
	Shall I some day be a part of all this fullness?
	 

	                               III.
        For it does seem as though everything will once again become number and smile
	And that no hope of completing the magnitude which surrounds us
	Is permitted us.  But this hope (which doesn’t exist) is
	Precisely a form of suspended birth,
	Of that invisible light which spatters the silence
	Of our everyday festivities.  A glebe which has pursued
	Its intentions of duration at the same time as reinforcing
	Its basic position so that it is now
	A boiling crater, form of everything that is beautiful for us.
	 

	                              IV.
        Simple, the trees placed on the landscape
	Like sheaves of wheat that someone might have left there.
	The manure of vanished horses, the stones that imitate it,
	Everything speaks of the heavens, which created this scene
	For our position alone.
	 
        Now, in associating oneself too strictly with the trajectories of things
	One loses that sublime hope made of the light that sprinkles the trees.
	For each progress is negation, of movement and in particular of number.
	This number having lost its indescribable fineness,
	Everything must be perceived as infinite quantities of things.
	 
        Everything is landscape:
	Perspectives of cliffs beaten by innumerable waves,
	More wheatfields than you can count, forests
	With disappearing paths, stone towers
	And finally and above all the great urban centers, with
	Their office buildings and populations, at the center of which
	We live our lives, made up of a great quantity of isolated instants
	So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things.
	 

	                              V.
        It is probably on one of the inside pages
	That the history of his timidity will be written,
	With all the libertine thoughts of a trajectory
	Roughly in the shape of a heart, around a swamp
	Which for many of us will be the ultimate voyage
	In view of the small amount of grace which has been accorded us,
	
	This banality which in the last analysis is our
	Most precious possession, because allowing us to
	Rise above ourselves, which would not be very much
	Without the presence of a lot of friends and enemies, all
	Willing to swear allegiance to us, entering thus
	The factory of our lives.  The greatest among us, counting little
	On this last minute ennoblement, remain
	Colossal, our wide-brimmed hats representing
	All the shame of glory, shutting us up in the idea of number:
	The ether dividing our victories, past and future: teeth and blood.