Yves Bonnefoy Poems

It's snowing.
Under the snowflakes the gate
Finally opens to the garden
Of more than the world.

I go forward. But my scarf
Gets caught on rusty
Iron and tears
In me the fabric of the dream.
...

And what must we think
Of these yellow apples?
Yesterday, they astonished, waiting like this, naked
After the leaves had fallen,

Today they charm
As their shoulders
Are modestly accented
With an edging of snow.
...

I go through the snow. I closed
My eyes, but the light can still get through
My porous eyelids, and I perceive
That in my words it's still the snow
That swirls, thickens, bursts.

Snow,
A letter that we find and unfold,
And the ink on it has faded and in the marks
The clumsiness of the wit is visible
Which can only muddle up its sharp shadows.

And we try to read, we don't understand
Who is interested in us in memory,
Except that it's summer again; and we see
Under the flakes the leaves, and the heat
Rise from the missing sun like a mist.
...

It sounds like a lot of silent e's in a sentence.
One feels that one owes them
Only shadows of metaphors.

It's like,
As soon as it is snowing more heavily,
These hands that push away other hands

But play with the fingers they have rejected.
...

Flakes,
Blunders, without repercussions of the light.
One follows another and still others, as if
Understanding no longer mattered, nor laughing.

And Aristotle said it very well,
Somewhere in his Poetics that we read so poorly,
The value of transparency,
In phrases like the buzzing of bees,
is like clear water.
...

Lucretius knew it:
Open the chest
And you will see that it's full of swirling
Snow.

And sometimes two flakes
Meet, combine,
Or else one turns aside gracefully
In its small death.

Where does the idea come from that it's clear
In a few words
When the one is only the night,
The other only a dream?

Where do those two shadows come from
Going along smiling,
And the one muffled up
In red wool?
...

It's snowing. Soul, did you expect
To have eternal birth?
See, you have there
Even a party dress for death.

Finery like in adolescence,
Of those that we take in anxious hands
As the fabric of it is transparent and remains near
Fingers that open it out in the light,
We know that it's as fragile as love.

But corollas and leaves are embroidered there,
And already the music can be heard
In the neighbouring room, where the lights are.
A mysterious ardour takes your hand.

You go, your heart pounding, into the big snow.
...

The flake hesitates in the blue sky
Once again, the last flake of the big snow.

And it's as though she who must surely have imagined
What could be would enter the garden,
That look, that simple god, without remembering
The tomb, without any thought but happiness,
Without any future
Except its dispersal in the blue of the world.

‘No, don't touch me,' he would say to her,
But even to say no would shed light.
...

Just before dawn
I look through the window, and I think I understand
That it has stopped snowing. A blue puddle
Spreads, sparkling a little, in front of the trees,
From one end to the other of the night.

I go out.
I cautiously go down the wooden stairs
Where the fresh snow has levelled the steps.
The cold surrounds and penetrates my ankles,
It seems that my mind is clearer because of it,
Which perceives better the silence of things.

He is still sleeping
In the confusion of the pile of wood
Ricked under the window,
The chipmunk, our simple neighbour,
Or is he already roaming in the crunchy cold?
I see tiny marks in front of the door.
...

I had gone out
To get some water at the well by the trees,
And I was in the presence of another sky.
Disappeared was the constellations of a moment before,
Three quarters of the firmament was empty,
The most intense black reigned there alone,
But to the left, above the horizon,
Mixed with the top of the oaks,
There was a cluster of glowing stars
Like a blazing fire, from which even a cloud of smoke rose.

I went back in
And I re-opened the book on the table.
Page after page,
There were only indecipherable marks,
Aggregates of forms with no meaning
Although vaguely recurring,
And underneath a bottomless whiteness
As though what one calls the mind fell there, noiselessly,
Like snow.
I nevertheless turned the pages.

Many years before
In a train at the moment of daybreak
Between Princeton Junction and Newark,
That is, two accidental places for me.
Two arrows fallen to earth from nowhere,
The travellers were reading, silent
In the snow that was sweeping across the grey windows,
And suddenly,
In an open newspaper a couple of feet away from me,
A big photograph of Baudelaire,
A whole page
As the sky empties at the end of the world
To agree to the disorder of the words.

I drew together this dream and the memory
When I walked, first all one autumn
In woods where soon it was the snow
That triumphed, in many of those signs
That we receive, contradictorily,
From the world devastated by language.
The conflict of two principles came to an end,
It seemed to me, two lights mingled,
The edges of the wound healed.
The white mass of cold fell in bursts

Onto colour, but a roof in the distance, a painted
Plank leaning against a railing,
It was still colour, and mysterious,
Like one who would emerge from the tomb and, cheerful:
‘No, don't touch me,' he would say to the world.

I really owe a lot to Hopkins Forest,
I keep it on my horizon, in its part
That abandons the visible for the invisible
By the quivering of the blue of the distance.
I listen to it, through the noises, and sometimes even,
In the summer, scuffing the dead leaves
Of other years, vivid in the half-light
Of the oak trees that are too dense among the stones,
I stop, I think that this ground opens
To the infinite, that these leaves fall there
Without haste, or else go back up, the high, the low
No longer being, nor the noise, except the light
Whisper of the flakes that soon
Increase, get closer, join together,
- And then I see again all the other sky,
I enter for an instant into the big snow.
...