[…]

 

We speak in the present but the tense
hardly matters: time on a rock face is
worn

 

away. Life is not what lasts, the feeling
of wind over sands and hills, an eternity
that

 

became fleeting thanks to a few words
traced by breath in ash, the author
having

 

vanished long before. Words and waters
will be our descendants. We will have

 

deserted this earth but trees continue to
travel to rake the sky with their branches
to

 

endure the seasons that come and go, we
will have reached open sea after which

 

time no longer counts, only appearances
remain, images altered

 

by reflecting light.
We have reached the river. The walk begins
beyond. We have crossed the threshold into
this kingdom that others cross out through
a simple game of writing. We come back
skin reddened by nettles and gorse, all
power abandoned to shameless sovereigns.
Those who are like us but do not know us.
They walk alongside our destiny. They
beckon us to approach. We are already
bound to our first roots, trees of blood and
words. We reside here in complete
confidence.

 

 

 

[…]

 

 

What a wait it’s been, in the rain revolving
around the trees. We no longer know

 

which god to entrust our unbelief to. We
question the moors for makeshift replies,

 

a future carried far off course. We are
attached to this world by a few fragile ties,

 

by a few words whose meaning we don’t
properly understand. We feel that the ash

 

disowns the short-lived, claims perpetuity.
We think of those ragged villages we will
never know. With a gesture, we dismiss the
day, we close the window to better
appreciate the barely visible movements of
trees that remind us of the halt and rush of
sunless days, of uprooted mornings where
childhood was a season away in the very
place where everything shies, the refuge of
a boulder at the edge of a precipice, a cave
choked with waters to welcome us.

 

 

 

[…]

 

We can easily say that nothing is lost or
saved, that everything remains the

 

same in its newness, seeds and harvest
gathering together in a gesture that

 

remains. We catch ourselves doubting
reality: that of a wall, a forest, a pond.

 

Faced with the world, we understand that
this ever so light passage was only

 

transparent, signs barely traced out by the
wind. We long to discover what we

 

have travelled over so often. These
localities, bogged down in the memory,

 

like a bird stuck in the mud.

 

There’s no lesson to bear in mind apart
from that delivered by a prodigious earth.
Are you answerable for the words that fall
with the rain and cease as it ceases? They
weigh the same as water on a child’s cheek.
They complete their journey with the
lightness a leaf has. You only investigate the
lack of them, explore, examine their hidden
intention. And you emerge alone at the
crossroads, hands stiff with cold, freed of
all speech.

 

 

 

The French poet Max Alhau was born in Paris in 1936. He was a professor of modern literature and chargé de mission for poetry at the University of Paris-Nanterre. His discovery of the Alps and its landscapes shaped his writing into a celebration of wide-open spaces and the unity between man and nature. He is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry.

Patrick Williamson is an English poet and translator. His most recent poetry collections include Traversi (English-Italian, Samuele Editore, 2018), and Beneficato (SE, 2015). Williamson is editor and translator of The Parley Tree, Poets from French-speaking Africa and the Arab World (Arc Publications, 2012) and translator notably of Max Alhau (France), Tahar Bekri (Tunisia), Gilles Cyr (Quebec), as well as Italian poets Guido Cupani and Erri de Luca. His recent translations appear in Transference, Metamorphoses, and Tupelo Quarterly. He is a founding member of the transnational literary agency Linguafranca.