Whether it’s true or false
We said to ourselves that you would continue to play dead by omission or out of laziness to distinguish you from those who walk with their backs to the city’s noise that you’d offer us a bottle of sherry to celebrate the coming of a winter clad in Afghan goat’s wool and boots gathered in the tombs of the rich.
Whether it’s true or false
We also said to ourselves that your walled-up voice would be able to decide among us when it came to the distribution of winds in the plane-tree on the square and to train the fireflies escaped from the sleeves of darkness to light up God’s road when he came alone to check the content of his snow, and to see if passersby slipped on his tears when he suddenly felt like weeping.
*
Must you be reminded that you are only what is said and forgotten
brother of shadows calling out in the chestnut tree
sketched thought
silence chipped away by use
that the wind pushing you toward the pond is not the pond’s friend, nor the friend of the washerwomen who wring you out with the red linens of women in childbirth, who complain of pebbles in their chests as their arms fall when night does
when their arms drop with darkness
*
Let’s admit that your disappearance was a pretense
staged in complicity with the eclipse of a comic sun
that you never went far from the doorstep where you made holes in the sky with your slingshot killing angels and bluejays with one blow
only imaginary the feathers that bloodied the gray woman’s hair
how to know who plucked the angel’s feathers and ate the bluejay
and that what happened, happened
*
Let’s admit that you made a bad decision
Having chosen walls with a view of other walls is no reason to speak ill of the snails in the garden and the grass that doesn’t remember your name
Not the slightest echo of your consultations with the blackbird who had a crush on himself becoming two blackbirds in the bay window
No sign either of an eventual sketch of your face the steam rising from the soup is the image of no known soul
The woman standing facing the sink makes the faucet cry
*
The shovels peeling away the world’s underside make no distinction
between broken glass pebbles bones
you trust the arms that wield them
the mouths that gulp down the planet’s most intimate waters
tear it asunder to bury hands and tools
Seen from afar
those men camped on two lands at once
spread their legs like a compass so as not to be snatched up by the great all
that is nothing
*
Who will find lost time
who will tie it to the foot of the bed
who will hoist it up on the horse that gallops in four directions at once
You ask the most ignorant wind your questions
the one who mistakes a bulrush in your garden for a tardy visitor,
the sound of the storm on the roof for a quarrel between pigeons
Cantankerous wind
that refuses to sit down at the table with you for a frank discussion
to share your soup
or go back to the turbulent road that dropped it on your threshold
How to make it understand that the drainpipe is better than the cat door for coming into your house?
*
The woman who wasn’t in the photo taps her thigh
and the wind bends its neck for the leash
curls up under the table next to the dog who becomes a wolf when night stripes the panes
the wolf, she says
is only a wolf by hearsay and gossip
he doesn’t trample the young grass
doesn’t mock widows in their dresses of grief
An angel before
and a beast behind
the wolf was a bell ringer in the age of cathedrals
a pilgrim with hairy knees
who stole weather vanes
His disappearance from books leaves her inconsolable
*
It’s winter in her photographs
The silence is cold enough to split a rock
She rubs her hands on the walls to create a little heat
counts them in both directions to have the impression of being rich
leafs through her garden like a book, adding words of her own invention
and a pair of pruning shears for the dead man to trim the laurel-tree that
grew askew
*
How can you weep in a language no longer your own
what can you call walls not imbued with your sweat
With your back against the closed door, you invoke the spirit of the place to keep away souls whose suffering is pending and coyotes
The key is under a stone analogous to all stones
you grope for the riverbed, to sleep there, and the sheets stretched between the banks
what stone to lift without panicking the lizards and scattering the fearful populace of ants
you know the wind can be no help to you
angry with the water
the well it has been digging for centuries is filled with your voice
–Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker
__________________________________
First appeared in A Public Space No. 23. Used with permission of A Public Space. Copyright by Marilyn Hacker.
