Status Updates From Poèmes 1933-1955 suivis de ...

From one of the end notes:
The summer solstice coincides with the Feast of St John (June 24th). On this day cledonisma (divination) is practiced. One custom is dropping molten lead into a container of "speechless" water (water carried secretly from a well by a child who does not speak on the way). The future is foretold from the shape the metal assumes when it hardens.

everything wants to burn.

As the pine tree at high noon,
overcome with resin,
hurries to give birth to flames
and endures the pangs no longer --

call the children to gather the ashes
and sow them.
What is gone is rightly gone.

And whatever is not yet gone
must be burned

The blank page, difficult mirror,
gives back only what you were.

The blank page speaks with your voice,
your own voice,
not the one you like

sky-filled clepsydra

Flame is healed by flame,
not through the stillicide of seconds
but all at once, in a flash
...

It is not a passage, this breathing,
but a tiller-thrust of lightning.

Years ago you said,
"In essence I am a matter of light."
And even now, whenever you rest
on the broad shoulders of sleep,
or even when they cast you
on the numb breast of the sea,
you seek corners where the blackness
has worn off and does not persist;
groping, you search for the appointed spear
to pierce your heart
that it may open to the light.

The companions had drive me mad
with theodolites, sextants, lodestones,
and telescopes that enlarged things--
better such things should stay distant.
Where will they lead us, such roads?
But that day which began
is perhaps not yet extinguished,
with fire in a ravine like a rose
and a weightless sea at the feet of God.