They haven’t lasted.

Just enough time to exist as small balls—smooth, dense little globes—a few days; then—obeying an inner impulse—time to open, to uncrinkle, like so many dawns about a golden haze of sunlight.

Like so many gowns, if you will. If the insistance of the daydream prompts you to it.

Opulent and frothy, like certain clouds.

An explosion: relatively slow, perfectly quiet.

Grace stealing out of the flowers.

Because they bow under their own weight, some down to the earth, it looks as if they’re greeting you, though you’d prefer to have greeted them first yourself.

       Grouped this way: one thinks of a ballet movement.

       As in Carpeaux’s La Danse, in front of the Opéra (at least the memory of it which comes back to me): one group turned toward the sky, the other, toward the earth.

       To grasp them, you’ll have to distance yourself.

       What will you see, then? A figure drawn on the mirror by condensation? A ball game?

       Hail, shrub full of grace.

       But here’s the old man once again, with or without an accomplice, spying on Suzanne through some hedge! I saw him coming, for this isn’t entirely by chance: one could well imagine a slightly agitated look like his, or theirs, chancing upon a movement in a ballet here, between tulle and satin—where the final bow to the earth is the salvation which is also yours, after all, crippled dreamers!

       But the curtain falls quickly, always too quickly, however graceful the farewells, however warm the applause. And you find yourself a bit more hunched, shivering a little more, in the black street.

       (That old man, with or without accomplice, you could follow him, on another such evening, right to his door; could describe, minutely or otherwise, his lodgings,

where the irremediable solitude is a rush of cold air even on the mildest days of the year; could tell how he defends himself against the lack of hope, the fatigue, the worry, by what ingenious or else, naïve, inventions; with what frail barriers he surrounds himself,

so as to push back, with a touching patience, the onslaught of the cold which threatens him, even when he knows he hasn’t a chance of winning. These things can and could have been said, if only to give hommage to human bravery; or, conversely, to denounce the cruelty, the monstrosity of the enemy who has so many names, and none. But I distinctly prefer playing at the almost hidden servant who still hangs these few pink and white paper lanterns in the foliage, as if one could still today celebrate a festival, even a festival of the dead, in this worm-eaten world.)

       These benign voyeurs, lost in their melancholy lust—will one ever see more clearly than they have? For that to happen, should there be more attentiveness or nonchalance? More, or fewer, detours? Surely, more innocence.

       Opulent, full-blown and frothy in the manner of certain clouds (which are, after all, only rain balled up, held in the hand still); clouds stopped, without fraying, in the foliage.

       Not any more like clouds, though, than smoothed-down dresses: peonies, and whatever else steals off and escapes you—into another world, one hardly tied to your own.

       It’s the oldest flower I retain in my memory, in the garden, still vaguely visible from very far off: heavy flower, damp, like a cheek against my infant knee, in the enclosure of high walls and pruned hedges.

       They quickly crumple, become yellowish and mauve, like old love letters in a novel in the style of Werther.

       A passion with no future, nothing more than a redness seen through a cane screen such as one installs against the first summer flies.

       (How readily one says: “all that’s very well, but what about it?...”)

       They won’t have ornamented this corner of garden for long.

       Why then do flowers exist at all?

       They open, they unfold, as one might wish that time, our thoughts, our lives, would do.

       The ornamental, the useless, those hidden from sight.

Hail these plants, full of grace.

Living finery, brevity turned to finery, fragility made into finery.

With this particularity, at least: that they are heavy, that they bend: as if they’re too lethargic to carry their load of color. A few drops of rain, and there’s the scattering, the undoing, the fall.

The more trouble I give myself, even though it’s to their glory, the more they draw back into a world that’s inaccessible. Not that they are shy, or mocking, or coquettish! They don’t want you to speak in their place. Nor for you to cover them in praise, nor compare them to everything and nothing; instead of, quite simply, just pointing them out.

It’s nonetheless too much to write that they don’t want; or that they want anything at all. They inhabit another world at the same time as this one here; that’s precisely why they both escape and obsess you. Like a door that’s at once, inexplicably, half-open and bolted shut.

Even so, if it’s necessary to work via a resemblance to something other than they are, the most just comparison would be, for each, with a dawn: with a rose and white bloom around some pollen, some golden powdered sunlight: as if they were charged with keeping the memory of it alive, multiplying the proofs, refreshing the meaning.

I don’t know what it is that associates them with the rain, if not simply a childhood memory. And with a vault, an archway of green. They go together: is it because of the clouds?

Before the rain approaches, I go to meet the peonies.

They won’t have lasted.

When they’re approached—even when it’s not in the reality of a March day, but only in daydreams—they go before you, they push open the doors of the leaves, the almost invisible barriers. You go to follow them, under the green arcs; and when you turn back, perhaps you’ll notice you no longer cast a shadow, and your feet no longer leave any traces in the mud.

Translation from Philippe Jaccottet, Cahier de verdure suivi de Après beaucoup d’années, Gallimard, 1994: pp.101-107.

Published in Western Humanities Review, Fall 2005.