If you have
to leave again, lean against the wall in a crude shepherd’s shelter. And
don’t worry about that tree waving at you from over there. Its own fruit
will slake its thirst.
Having gotten up
before it could make sense out of itself, a word wakes us; it lavishes
upon us the brilliance of the day, this dreamless word.
Apple-colored space.
Space, flaming dessert dish.
Today is a wild
animal. Tomorrow it will leap.
Put yourself in the
gods’ place and take a look at yourself. This time, exchanged at birth,
having barely survived being weeded out, you are more invisible than they
are. And you repeat yourself less.
Earth has hands.
The moon has none. Earth ravages the moon.
Liberty, then, is the
void, a void to be desperately surveyed. After that, dear, most eminent
walled-in ones, there will be the strong odor of your undoing. Why should
that surprise you?
One ought to love that
thirsty nakedness, lustrous truth of a heart parched by its convulsive
blood!
Future that has already
disappeared! Plaintive world!
When the mask of
man is applied to Earth’s face, she gets her eyes put out.
Are we off our hinges
forever? Touched up with palliating beauty?
I would have taken
Nature as my partner, danced only with her. But couples don’t marry
at wine harvestings.
My love preferred the
fruit to its phantom. So, bent and unsubmissive, I reconciled one with
the other.
Three hundred and
sixty-five nights without daytimes, huge, massive, this is what I wish
upon the haters of the night.
They are going to make
us suffer but we’ll make them suffer. One should say to one’s luck: “Get
your revenge!” To time which separates us: “Shall I go to her? Ah, but
more than just a glimpse, if you please.”
The spoilers have arrived,
the empty ones. Guys prepared to terrorize.
Don’t trim the candle,
don't shorten the springtime of the ember. Those migrations on cold nights
won’t cease at the sight of you.
We’re trying out the
insomnias of Niagara, looking for stirred-up country, lands fit for newly
enraged natures.
Whoever painted
Lascaux, Giotto, Van Eyck, Uccello, Fouquet, Mantegna, Cranach, Carpacciio,
Giorgione, Tintoretto, Georges de la Tour, Poussin, Rembrandt, these are
the woolens lining my rocky nest.
Our storms are essential
to us. As to our suffering, society is not inevitably at fault, for all
its walls, its alternating collapse and restoration.
We can’t
measure ourselves by the image another has of us; the analogy soon loses
itself.
We will pass from imagined
death to death’s actual reeds. Life brushes against us, distracts itself
with us in the process.
Death is neither
over here nor over there. She is close by, industrious, humble.
I was born and grew
up among contradictions that were tangible at every moment, in spite of
their huge exactions and the beatings they gave each other. I hung out
at railway stations.
After lighting
up its own night, the radiant heart enlivens the limp wheat ear.
There are those who
leave behind poisons while others leave remedies. Difficult to tell which
is which. You have to taste.
The immediate yes
or no is healthy in spite of the corrections that will follow.
In the higher places there
is no guest, no sharing: only the elemental urn. A flash of lighting sketches
out the present as it scars the garden, innocently pursues its own span,
never ceasing to appear to have existed.
The darlings of the moment
haven’t lived as we have dared to live, without fear that our imagination
would be warped by our affection for it.
It is life alone that
kills us. Death is only the host who rescues the house from its fence and
shoves it to the edge of the forest.
Early sun, I see you,
but only where you no longer are.
Whoever believes the
enigma renewable, becomes the enigma.To clamber freely over that gaping
erosion, at times luminous, at times obscure, to know without establishing
will be his law, a law he will obey but which will get the better of him;
he will not establish but he will help to create.
One comes back again
and again to erosion. Suffering as opposed to fulfillment.*
All that we shall accomplish
from today on we shall accomplish for want of something better. Neither
with contentment nor despair. Our only light: Rembrandt’s flayed ox. But
how can we resign ourselves to the smell of the antiquated date marked
on the portal, we who in a crisis are intelligent, even foresightful?
Something very
simple is roughing itself out: fire rising, Earth depleted, snow flying,
a brawl breaking out. The gods-that-be are offering a bit of their leisure
to us; later we’ll be resented for having accepted it. I see a tiger
with his eyes wide open. Greetings. Who is it who has managed to be born
over there among the herbs to whom tomorrow all things will lay claim?
*At this point we can no longer see the shelter, and when we summon
it in our imagination, it no longer sends back its clairvoyant messages.
***