French Poems
from Double Dream of Spring (1970)
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.