the pale hour... (after L-P Fargue)

"l'heure passe que les mains de la nuit faufilent aux vieux murs..."

(when they are very old, you forget how long they have lived...

you feel that you should know them better, 

even if you have known them a long time)

as the pale hour steals by, leave shadows quiver in the fading light...

***

"on entend le bruit nombreux des feuilles partout comme un feu qui prend..."

(when they leave us, you realize you don't miss them so much...

even as you know they are gone forever,

but the grieving and the regrets remain)

a certain pervasive scent lingers on, infusing the amorphous life...

***

"un rayon rôde encore à la crête du mur, glisse d'une main calme  et nous conduit vers l'ombre..."

(and everyday is a little less - a little less of them, a little less of you...

you will not know them any more now

than when you had known them then)

the branches nod in silence, a black tangle upon the darkening sky...

*selected lines in french from "Au Fil de l'Heure Pâle" by LEON-PAUL FARGUE (1876-1947)

bachelard's reveries...

"In a reverie of solitude which increases the solitude of the dreamer, two depths pair off, reverberate in echoes which go from the depths of being of the world to a depth of being of the dreamer.

Time is suspended.

Time no longer has any yesterday and no longer any tomorrow. 

Time is engulfed in the double depth of the dreamer and the world."*

"Confronted with witnesses to the past, with objects and sites which recall memories and make them precise, the poet discovers the union of the poetry of memory and the truth of illusions.

Childhood memories relived in reverie are really "canticles of illusions" at the bottom of the soul"**

"In every dreamer there lives a child, a child whom reverie magnifies and stabilizes. Reverie tears it away from history, sets it outside time, makes it foreign to time.

One more reverie and this permanent, magnified child is a god."***

"...reverie toward childhood will experience a great benefit of repose if it deepens itself by following the reverie of a poet.

Within us, still within us, always within us, childhood is a state of mind."****

*from page 173 of The Poetics of Reverie by Gaston BACHELARD, (1969 translation from the French by Daniel Russell, Grossman Publishers, Inc.) published in 1971 by Beacon Press, Boston

** from page 119

*** from page 133

**** from page 130