The Bedroom

An adaptation from the French of Yves Bonnefoy's "A Shadow Breathing"

The mirror on the morning wall listens as swelling waters

speak darkly across the room. Two beacons converge and

blend among drifting lamps and tables.

The inhabitant is an island of somnolence adrift, melding with

another along stone borders where the placid seas of dream

are lost-forever shaped, forever shattered. A current stirs in

the vague depth of dream and, distantly, upon the darker water

of a table, the red dress, burning, sleeps.

It was midnight long ago; a static star ordered the spirals ot

other suns. Night's original hour bore noons in its lumen,

and words were whispered into the foliage of darkness:

An indifferent star, a ship's mast-the clear trail of one or the

other in still waters and firmament: whatever is stirred like a

vessel which turns, which glides, which does not know its own

heart in the night.

They have this sleep to traverse, like an immense, immobile

sea, the inhabitant's lone consciousness becoming eyes, mouth,

and heart of the vessel's mast, loving the dark currents,

drinking her eyes without memories. He was without that

dream of absences which grasp and do not grasp, wishless to

keep her midnight hues: blue and stone, magnificent, where

nothing ever ends.

Waters of the sleeper, tree of absence, hours without beaches;

in that boundlessness a night begins to end. How shall the

inhabitant name the new day-this muted mixture of crimson

and sable?

In the sleepers' eyes beacons dim. Words are minted which begin

to disperse the night's sparks, obscuring stars in the spindrift of

meaning-it is nearly the moment of waking, already re-

membrance.

The inhabitant does not know how to sleep without her; he does

not dare risk without her this motionless progression. Too late

he has found it to be one more dream-this region of compasses

tumbling toward death.

He has wished her, on his fever's pillow, not to be-or to be

dark as the clock's shadow. Yet when he spoke aloud in the

empty planet, she was there on sleep's vast seaways.

Dreams urged him on-dreams illuminated with vagrant lamps.

Night after night her reflection kept him from edges-

darknesses beyond darkness . . . dawn and morning love.

The inhabitant bent to that vale of numberless stones, listened

to its grave repose. He perceived, covert among gigantic

shades, the grotto where sleep's spindrift bleaches.

He listened to dream-monotonous, hollow, now and then

shattered by blind rock. Her voice faded, overwhelmed by

darkness; yet a freshet of narrow hope murmured in the

desert.

Elsewhere, in lustrous gardens, the inhabitant knows it is true:

a pagan peacock flaunts its mortal raiment. But his single

beacon suffices for her! She clothes the night with a curved

phrase.

Who is she? He knows her only as alarums, as a voice urging haste

in an unfinished rite. She apportions darkness to a tabletop-

her eyes like suns, the only lights.