The millenial gallop grows faint under the wing sheath of the wind . . .
     Honored guests of the wind, escorted by the great winds of exile, by shadows of huge plumes,
     The dust columns have come from tree saps and island medusas, from the fetishes of the Atlas Mountains and the rubble heaps of Saharan regs.
     Awakened along all the roads, the eyes of dust spied on us, slowing our gait, our trembling, like simulacra of stumbling stretches, of final stretches.
     The dust which devoured us and which devoured us as albinos,
     Under the crackle-backed seaplunge of the headland, in swarms of remorse, in our villages with their vast white middays;
     Raising their own riotous voices on our borders, blasting the silence with dashes of silence and palabrous cavalcades;
     The dust like a coral embroidery hemming the century, like a straw whip and quarrelsome wings,
     Streaking across events, cosmic shards, crossing the quest and the inquiry on every page of the zodiac.

3.

     When crime gave to each thing its unique domain,
     Great roots mimed within us each face of this world, every momentary errand, during every age of the mind,
     Great roots in the form of comets, clear-cut look-alikes and agile in their meandering headway
     Among the wear and tear and abductions,
     Among spent segments of mosques and fragmentary verses, among the rockweed snares of death's red lichen.
     And as the night of the arcana spawned the Gehenna of the vigil under the soil and under the arcades,
     A sea of dust extended as far as the eye could see, liberated from its clayey cardinal points, its most efficient routes, its seeds of fear;
     And in the distance unfurled the faces of the living laved with serenity like a grave and moving omen of the ocean.
     It is the ripple of vast shoulders of wisteria thwarting every hand that might offend the haven of the heart,
     It was an aubade of benisons, of peace itself, of all eternity surrounding meridianal geysers.
     Everyone fanned himself with the branches of his solitude, in the forest of his own retreat,
     And each drank from the jug of his prescience . . .
     Having issued forth from the flesh of nothingness like a gigantic tree of light,
     And with a bird hung about our necks, we read from the open eyes of immense books.

Translated from the French
by Eric Sellin