Hopkins Forest

I'd gone out
to get water from the well, near the trees,
and I was in the presence of another sky.
Gone were the constellations
there a moment before.
Three fourths of the firmament was empty,
the intensest black shone there alone,
though to the left, above the horizon,
in among the tops of the oaks,
there was a mass of reddening stars
like firecoals, from which smoke even rose.

I went back inside
and re-opened the book on the table.
Page after page,
there were only indecipherable signs,
clusters of forms without any sense,
although vaguely recurring,
and beneath them an abyssal white
as if what we call the spirit
were falling there, soundlessly,
like snow.
Still, I went on turning the pages.

Many years earlier,
in a train at the moment when the day rises,
between Princeton Junction and Newark,
— that is to say, two chance places for me,
two arrows fallen out of nowhere —
the passengers were reading, silent
in the snow that was sweeping the gray windows,
and suddenly,
in a newspaper open next to me —
a big photograph of Baudelaire,
a whole page,
as if the sky were emptying at the world's end
in recognition of the chaos of words.
I put together this dream and this memory
when I walked, all of one fall,
in woods where snow would soon triumph,
among the many signs we receive,
contradictorily,
from the world devastated by language.
The conflict between two principles,
it seemed to me, was nearing an end,
two lights were becoming one,
the lips of a wound closing.
The white mass of the cold was falling in gusts
on color, but a roof in the distance, a painted
board, standing against a gate,
was color still, and mysterious,
like someone coming out of a tomb, laughing,
and telling the world, "No, don't touch me."

Truly I owe a lot to Hopkins Forest.
I keep it on my horizon, in that place
where the visible gives way to the invisible
in the trembling of the blue in the distance.
I listen to it, amid other sounds,
and at times even, in summer,
kicking the dead leaves of other years
lying as if lit in the shade of oaks
grown densely among stones,
I stop: I believe that the ground is opening
to the infinite, that the leaves are falling into it
without hurry, or coming up again,
above and below no longer existing,
or sound, only the light
whispering of snowflakes that soon
multiply, draw closer, bind together —
and then I see again the whole other sky,
I enter for a moment the great snow.

By Yves Bonnefoy