TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY PATRICK WILLIAMSON

Horizons

All the light you need, all
the shade you need to be true
to yourself, to be free, you think so, be true
insofar as that still means
something, today when harsh winds
rage at your heels
your hand clutches where there’s still light.

Your life is up there, right up there,
you enter by fire, you know about
lying now, about betrayal, the storm
shook the ship, wrenched masts, the shock
threw you so far – suddenly you neither hear
nor see a horizon, neither touch
love nor the forgetting of love.

But the shore, you presume a shore out in the sticks
a voice burrows and scours the darkness
time will stir again soon
– each hour harbours your destiny.

Unpredictable

Just a distant memory of reading
and life, these passions that we call loves
like indecipherable forests, rivers
of sap and blood that surge only to vanish
just as fast, the cup of caresses
breaks in our hands, elation
muddled by elsewhere

– a castle full of relentless
violence and abrupt torments
towers like closed
wings that point
to no horizon —

and if you seek the true life
until the confines of a season
where your dreams light up
like so many hopes
a never-kept promise
of reality, a sapped tree
you the vast illusion, I the stranger

and if you seek the true life, you’ll hear
deep in your heart, your soul
the constant murmur of things,
a frail world
the disorder of yet unfulfilled dreams
and these fleeting shapes you create
slide to the bottom of the well.

So fragile, you feel so fragile
in the arms of time that pushes
vanishing skies towards you.

You thought forever
it’s winter, a tide of shades
at your desperate fingertips.

Which voice, which face
will tell you where to enter
seize the stone, the grass
the rose – the very little that beats
like a promise
fulfils your desires?

You hear the lacerated ice
of the past is returning
you hear the thick foliage of autumns
in the garden of departures
what other life do we expect?

A tree, a patient insect
bear within the world’s turmoil
and words like a reflection
of unhurried hopes
that rise to the surface.

The journey still ongoing
that takes me to the beginning of myself
and the crossing knows no port.

Vast wings, boats of absence
a wounded castle. The wind torments
forests devoid of memory, pierces wrecks
ruins already rusted by too many winters.

I return along scattered paths
to the four corners of night, through words
crouched in my father’s language
cries, stammering, coarse
words that tell no stories
and crunch fruit and wait for spring.

I long searched for the threshold
of my own home, weighty stones
cluttered the passage.

Today I’m moving towards what I become
I melt into myself, upright myself
elevate myself to the east of my tree
so everything begins
with what we call living.

I’ve understood so many things
from my joys and heartbreaks.

Time burns in my hands
like yellowed leaves, the imprint
of each solitude
that we look at eyes closed.

And if, behind our steps, the world
begins to beat again, then return
like great tides
lands we never laid eyes on
and if I still bear a trace
it’s one of hope in a beginning
that we’ll start over again.

Publication credit: Poems initially published in French in Comme résonne la vie, Editions Bruno Doucey, 2018

Also, read Tempting Fate written by Jean Frémon, translated from the French by John Taylor, and published in The Antonym.

||  Tempting Fate — Jean Frémon