[TO FOLLOW THE HORSES’HOOF STEPS]



To follow the horses’hoof steps
and their manes whitened by the cold
and their slower gait over the wet meadows

or along the motionless edges of woods
with the dormouse or the bald sun

to be born
to vanish
in the curve of the eyelike stars
Father of every end and all beginnings

in the shelter of a clearing down there
with the autumn crocuses and the mowed grass
in the shrill jingling of the bells
in the remote reaches of the memory of leaves



Pierre Voélin, “In the Language of Ferns”, Light and Other Footsteps/La Lumière et d’autres pas, in To each unfolding leaf, Selected poems: 1976-2015, The Bitter Oleander Press, New York, 2017, page 181. Translated from the French by John Taylor.