THE STARRED SUSPENDERS
Still there were mornings where, I can't quite say,
even in winter, but at any rate especially in spring, summer
(not to mention autumn, its decline truly supreme),
yes mornings where everything was about to definitely begin.
When I say everything, that's everything. Meaning: the entire
world everywhere in all directions gushing forth, like a wave
or a girl with her fists on her hips laughing: here I am, it's me.
Not that the world didn't exist
the day before, the day before that, or
the countless prior days which had preceded me,
but (and one attributed then a certain distance,
a certain incapacity for fervor or confidence),
it had remained set there under the pure transparency
of a thin film clinging so right to its contours,
that one could most of the time miss out its presence
much as in the dining room that of the flowered wallpaper.
We nonetheless lived, but as if on a theater stage
with circular décor planted to adorn the days,
for an illusion of depth behind thoughts and beings
no less narrowly closed in on themselves as if deaf.
Then one morning with the tear of the membrane's cover,
one discovered the truth of colors, of forms.
Something stirred deep within the motionless decor
and, a light scrap of air milder in the air, one was
traversed by the birdsong itself cut up like straw,
by the sparks of the river and its bushes of smells.
And each step came against a string stretched to breaking,
silky thread of the weft then vibrating altogether
both as far as the sky in an unvaulted crystal's echo
and over the whole of the earth's space underway in its greatness.
Most beautiful of all, when I'd walk thus along the banks,
was, near the landing dock, the huge pile of coal
shining like diamond above their barricade made of beams,
and further on this marvelously pink small chocolate
manufacture, perfuming the air with its sheet steel chimneystack
straight under the hill where the lilac's froth foamed.
The light gilded the planet's black entrails,
and in my head the string vibrated well beyond the seas.
Even without moving I sensed change and speed;
with vast strides the electric pylons passed
humming from hemisphere to hemisphere, from one moment
to the next one was about to get there but leave. I remember:
at the time I sported a fairly extraordinary pair of suspenders,
not terribly elastic frankly but, against a backdrop of night blue,
sown with tiny stars that seemed to raise me off the ground.
And, even though now I use like most a belt, redivided
every morning according to an order hardly new,
I've stayed floating between the coal and the stars.
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