TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY PATRICK WILLIAMSON
Every day that dawns and sets, I keep repeating this gesture. This need to skim the sky, to pace the seasons, to walk the labyrinth. I throw ink onto sheets of paper to raise the sails, to cross the mist.
To go somewhere else. It’s like a whisper, a secret or lost song whose music permeates the silence. And it’s always the same phrase that I pick up on my shoulders to the place where it seems to fall.
No matter how hard I try to get away from it, I know I have to return to the poem, pick up the phrase again, not to prolong it, but to hear it again, where I was deaf to its jingling.
***
Those flimsy hours at the foundation of the world
And yet I still have your song in my hands
All it took was a tremor
To turn the world upside down
This life scaffolded by dreams
The beating of a butterfly’s wings
To rouse the waves in our lives
***
I live in a fragile presence
Somewhere off the coast of oblivion
Between the ocean and the bent light
Where dreams are no more than a whisper
An upturned wave that ends in your hands
Sometimes I cross the city between two twilights
Because I only remember by walking
I am merely a light in the landscape of your eyes.
***
Where are you now?
You no longer inhabit anything but my inner cathedral
You shine on the altar as if in the middle of the forest
Where your absence is only light
It is a shoreless land that I am trying to relearn
A ghostly land floating in the mist that envelops the leaf on the table
I sense you like an amputated country
A severed presence that persists where it once was
and is no more
We know and have always known we must continue on the path
There is no compass for living
Wounds are wings for the dove
***
Your white eyes and your dawn voice
In the song of the world’s first mornings
It shines out among other women’s voices
Like the birds on the cheesemaker in the morning
I realise that the lingering childhood calls out for you
It’s like a lemon scent at the tip of the tongue
The apple tree is still planted in my memory
You are the only country I can inhabit without interrupting the dream
***
Sometimes, as I walked through the city that will remain a stranger to you, I thought I caught a glimpse of you. You seemed like an invisible word in the evening fires. A firefly at the foot of the sensitives closed in by the night.
Sometimes, as I walked through the days you will never know, I saw your footsteps in the snow.
Also, read Poems by Max Alhau, translated from French by Patrick Williamson, on The Antonym.
Also, read Poems by Bernard Pozier, translated from French by Patrick Williamson, on The Antonym.
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