[UNTITLED]

Already, he’s no longer who he was.
Breath torn out: unrecognizable. 

Cadaver. A meteor’s less far from us.

Let them take that thing away. 

A man—this airborne risk,
more like hail under lightning than an insect of glass and tulle,
this boulder of rumbling generosity and smiles,
this vessel, weighing more for all its works and recollections—,
tear out his breath: rotted matter. 

Who avenges himself, and for what, by this gob of spit?

Ah, let them disinfect this place.

[UNTITLED]

Mute. Even words untie themselves from him.
He exits them.
Frontier. For a brief time  
we hold him in our sights.
He hardly hears us anymore.
Will we hail him as a stranger if he does forget
our language, and no longer halts to listen?
He has business elsewhere.
He has no business anymore.
Even facing us,
it’s as though his back alone were visible. 

Back arching over, but
what to pass beneath?

[UNTITLED]

 Not a breath more.

As when the morning wind
has overwhelmed
the last candle. 

There is in us so profound a silence,
were a comet
en route toward our daughters’ daughters night,
we would hear it.
 

from ‘Leçons’, À la lumière d’hiver (Gallimard, 1994).

Three translations published in Verse, vol. 22, 1, 2005.

[UNTITLED]

Like the mountain in that moment of dark and biting cold, I waited to be dawned upon, to raise myself like Lazarus out of the sarcophagus of rock, while all around, wind hoed through the grass.
            I was dead like him and nothing was about but the goring of the wind, the whip-cracking of the cold, nothing would have happened,
            if there hadn’t suddenly come that troop of birds, utterly invisible, reduced to the whistling rockets of their zealous cries;
            and as they climbed ever higher through the black degrees, you’d think they were hurrying to raise the black flagstone of the tomb
            or knocked, all together, at a door
            tiny angels in a frenzy, fierce little workers, lacking any tool but their piercing voices (joyful or despairing, there was no telling which)
            to lift that black flagstone,
to knock at that door whose hinge of stone it seemed would never turn.

            Whoever could knock with such tenacity and fury
in the mountain
            wouldn’t he also make the day dawn?

Extract from ‘Sur les degrés montants’, Cahier de verdure (Gallimard, 1994).

Translation published in Verse, vol. 21, 1-3, 2004.