[Nietzsche Circle][Hyperion]

Passing Fire

I passed by fire beheld in vacancy
Hall shuttered tight and out extinguished light.

And I saw it burned still, and even was,
And at an instant, at the point of poise
Between the acts of ash, of embering
At which to fire the option to desire
Which whether wild or waver to embrace
Of who she has seduced into the couch
Of fragrant lambent grass, of broken wood.
He is the bend of bough I brought into
A yesterday, so quickened summer rain,
He memories a Hindu god’s regard,
With some solemnity’s initiate love,
Of she who would of he who’d be encased
By lightning anteceding all the worlds.

Tomorrow I will sift
This fire near full to frigid, it will be
Without doubt summer day the such as sky
Endows all rivers, those that of the earth
And melancholy coronary floods.
The man and woman, know where to what time
Their ravel flame is braiding or deduced?
What wisdom modest in them is foreknows
Within a falter diffidence of light
When cry of bliss will curl the scream of throes?

Fire of Mornings,
Breathing of two beings who repose,
The arm of one enshouldered to the two.
And I who have be come
To bring to air the hall, to bring to light,
Arrest, I sit, I give you my regard,
An innocence of members into spray,
Time packed so thick with time it’s stopped to be.

—Yves Bonnefoy (trans: Mark Daniel Cohen)

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, October 2007)