Status Updates From Poems of Rene Char

Watch, acute porter, morning to morning
Long, coiling their jets, the frantic brambles,
The land pressing us with its absent gaze,
The ache growing numb, a cricket's level song,
And a god springing only to swell the thirst
Of those whose speech is addressed to living waters.
Then rejoice, dearest, in the fate following:
This death does not end memory in love.

You are a beauty, springtime, colt,
As you splash the sky with your mane
And cover the bulrushes with foam!
The whole of love dwells in your chest:
From the pale-face Lady of Africa
To the Magdalen with the mirror,
Idol that fights, and grace that meditates.

My love in the beacon-blue dress,
I kiss the fever of your face
where the light lies taking its secret joy.

I love and am sobbing. I am alive
and your heart is this Morning Star
with the victorious endurance blushing
before breaking the battle of constellations.

Distant from you, may my body be the sail
shunning the wind.

The great funeral-pyre of joinings
Under the spiral failure sky
Is winter in a rotted boat
From solid comrades to liquid companions
Death beds beneath tree bark
In earth's vacant depths
Arches forge wings in fresh quantity
Radiant tillage adores the sodden healers
On the straw of fatalists
The foam of stars flows fully lit
There is no absence irreplaceable.