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for Patricia Joan Jones
'The moon on the one hand, the dawn on
the other:
The moon is my sister, the dawn is my brother.
The moon on my left and the dawn on my right.
My brother, good morning: my sister, good night.'
Hilaire Belloc, 'Early Morning'
O my soul, how words can be
timid, fearful, taciturn,
when the high scattered columns of the dawn
gently cover the rivers with crimson gold!
What a surfeit of meanings beyond meaning
is in the light that passes through
our fainthearted understanding!
And how that urge to know, O my soul, adds
to the elegance of a sentence the fresh, quivering,
unexpected scents of humility!
Thus we live in forgetfulness of the essential,
an oblivion that no longer needs even half-light...
and when we are suddenly surprised to find
that the perfect precision of an ancient phrase
seizes our whole being,
we muddle ourselves with the warning songs
of millennial poets!
Sometimes, a terror of remembering comes whirling into our hearts,
invading our weary eyelids with a
fluttering of eyelashes,
and the air, without losing the flowers it carries,
quivers like a beloved book
and moves in the light of the flickering lamp
that someone forgot to turn off.
Don't we give to towns and homelands
only the brightness of our tears,
the honesty of our gestures and childlike caresses?
But we must live out these tender distances between thoughts
as soon as grief makes the sky tremble
and falls lucidly among the branches
of the thoughtful cherry trees!
O my soul, how words can be
eloquent, bright and fleeting
when time, without turning back,
walks away singing
like a smiling god,
from our still fresh scars!
translated from the French by Norton Hodges
05.07.05.
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