^{translated from the French by Rose DeMaris}

Dreaming, I leave footprints
in the places
where you passed, 
hide my heart under
disheveled branches,
tangled in love. 
This bough looks like
my old friend’s smile,
charming and tender 
in a photograph.
Evening, thick with echoes,
tugs my soul toward 
blue, to the realm of
those I’ve lost.
This is the hour of dusk 
when Rousseau shivered,
when Poe pondered the dead,
and Baudelaire 
communed.
Under the sea’s blanket
a ripe fruit slowly falls 
asleep, even prettier now
than in the morning.
And night’s peeled apple 
rises over a mountain:
sweet, shining moon!
My young heart falters 
under the weight of this
beauty, too much, too
much, and the mystery of 
the darkening
world.
Suddenly these tears, 
tears misunderstood,
tears of a child
without brother or sister, 
slip from my shut eyes.

 

Crepuscle

Très lentement mon pas rêveur
Marque le sol de vos allées;
Et je marche, étreignant mon coeur,
Sous vos branches échevelées;
S’enlacant amoureusement,
Dans les festoons de leur feuillage
A moi sourit comme une image
D’ami lointain tendre et charmant. 
… Et c’est le sir … et le silence
Avec ses échos assoupis
Coule dans mon âme en partance
Vers un ciel de rêves amis.
Ah! c’est l’heure crépusculaire
Oui faisat frissonner Rousseau,
Où songeait aux morts Edgar Poe,
L’heure où méditait Baudelaire …
Sous le linceul du flot lointain
Disparait l’ardente prunella
Du soleil, si gaie au matin,
Mais à cette heure bien plus belle!
Et la prunella de la nuit
Se lève haut sur la montagne,
Eclairant la vaste campagne;
C’est la douce lune qui luit!
Et mon coeur si jeune se serre
Sous la splendeur de ce beau soir …
L’ombre lui pèse et le mystère
Du monde lui semble trop noir …
Et des larmes, sans juste cause,
Larmes d’une incomprise peur,
Larmes d’enfant sans frère ou soeur,
Glissent sur ma paupière close …

^{translated from the French by Rose DeMaris}

Through forests of firs all crowded with boughs, past old stones, beneath broken oaks, I come to
you, sweet village, you who sweep your velvet cloak across this land, green, greenest garment
with the sun’s heat held within its pleats. You unfold it, undulant, over this lonely valley where
even whispers echo, and you soften granite angles, and cover tender hills in green, green against
the fearsome world, never ceasing to stroke with warmth, with secret sugars, never ceasing—

Now each slope
shimmers, sequined
with petals!

Abord

A travers le forêts de sapins, à travers
Les guirlands en fleurs, les rochers, les grands chenes,
Je suis venue à toi, doux village qui traines
Ton manteau velouté aux environs tout verts.

Tu le traînes partout ton manteau de verdure ;
Il a de longs sillons de soleil souriant,
Il a de larges plis profonds et ondoyant
Dans l’obscure vallée où des échos murmurent …

Sous ses bords élargis s’abritent les rondeurs
Des alentours craintifs, de timides collines
Ne cessent de frôler à sa douceur caline
Leurs flancs tout pleins de lui, tout pailletés de fleurs !

Comes brazen, even in daylight, ordained by the gods
Holds infinite motes in suspension, appears citrine
Enters sometimes obliquely, outwits the amulet, the chant
Leaves a hot-to-touch scar, initiates a tenderness of decades
Says you are gone
Causes drought, chronic longing, the unwitting
             all-night vigil, tears on linoleum, the shut door
Manifests as pestilent thorns if overindulged or ignored
Transforms if acknowledged, gazed
           lightly upon, if made recipient of secret letters
Granulates in a climate of continuous acceptance
Reduces to lambent dust, self-luminous
Bestows a capacity for seeing, breaches
              the retina, darkens the limbal ring of the eye
Does not ever really leave, but suffuses the system
Hums in spring in the skull on the lap of the Magdalene
Links to the global network through which compassion passes
           as juice passes through my hands now folded on the tablecloth
           and into the hard green beginnings of our orchard’s plums
Repeats you are gone
Looks, under a microscope, like sugar many times refined
Heats the bulbs, the clenched peonies, the bunched-up
clumps of leaves to a point of capitulation
Opens glossy folios, ultraviolet, in the mind.

Cold and metalline, the soul was mined from rocks, became
               thin wire that keeps the colors in this enameled jewel from
bleeding. The soul remembers old pacts, yields to the demands of all
     lifetimes, sways in the style of windblown lindens and other
greens. Hammered, the soul is a container: yellow watering
                can that pours a body into the base of a lime tree at the hour

of death. My soul looks like a lock of red hair bound by purple
               thread. Marine-scented, my soul is contained: Atlantic sand
inside an hourglass. But somebody holds a portion of it. He
       is an oyster enclosing one grain. My soul tastes like a lilac
branch rubbing against the rusty corrugated shed on a humid
             day. And so I shake when he gets off the train. Sharp, the soul

is an iron fence of fleurs-de-lis where a passerby puts a baby’s
               lost cotton sock. It is there in the pink lipstick-stained cigarette
smashed on the sidewalk, rolled white paper embellished with
        one blue stripe. The soul is engineered, an eternal car moving
ancient attachments across eons. Cold and metalline, the soul
                was mined from rocks, a silver durability that began in a star.