Mill Creek, Paradise valley, Montana
What better witness than this evening snow,
its steady blind quiet, its eventual
completeness, a talc smoothing every surface
through the lumen tricks of ice.
No one who comes here hastens to leave,
though the mineral winter makes a dull
math of cold inside the bones, a numbness
thinning into each fingertip and eye.
Faint injury traveling toward earth
in shifting silence, a softness in the weather
passing through us, dark moods of snows –
a sense of peace so deep we extend out
into the blackness of our lives, dread and failure,
and feel no hint of terror, only the premonition
of drift-design, the stars behind the snow
burning in ancient immanence over the field.
What lights a world gone blank with despair?
You were here once; you will be here again.
Une excellente recension (Ron Slate) de Circadian (Penguin 2007), ici.
"The enveloping sounds, the quality of light: something passes through us, “premonition / of drift-design.” Klink unabashedly can say “ancient immanence” and “blackness of our lives” and “a sense of peace so deep” without sounding at all precious. Although she maps out an agenda for us among her landscapes, Klink is utterly loyal to the freedom she would have us enjoy. This fidelity is what I hear in the skillfully handled, resonant final lines of “Winter Field.”
This is one of those rare instances when I have to agree with the blurber’s use of superlatives. Joanna Klink’s Circadian is remarkable."
Un autre poème, également extrait de Circadian :
A quand une traduction française ? Ce serait un beau cadeau de Noël pour les francophones ...
Some Feel Rain
Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle
in its ghost-part when the bark
slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against
each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there.
When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air
drop its motes to the patch-thick slopes of
snow. Tiny blinkings of ice from the oak,
a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer
you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy
owl it carries. Some feel the terrible sunlight
well up in blood-vessels below the skin
and wish there had been less to lose.
Knowing how it could have been, pale maples
drowsing like a second sleep above our temperaments
Do I imagine there is any place so safe it can’t be
snapped? Some feel the rivers shift, blue veins
through soil, as if the smoke-stacks were a long gray
dream of exhalation. The lynx lets its paws
skim the ground in snow and showers.
The wildflowers scatter in warm tints until
the second they are plucked. You can wait
to scrape the ankle-burrs, you can wait until Mercury
the early star underdraws the night and its blackest
districts. And wonder. Why others feel
through coal-thick night that deeply-colored garnet
star. Why sparring and pins are all you have.
Why the earth cannot make its way towards you.
A quand une traduction française ? Ce serait un beau cadeau de Noël pour les francophones ...
