This girl who has appeared
to
us,
But knowing she will die if the teacher discovers her
She begs us to be discreet so she can live on for a moment more
And be a pretty girl among the adolescent boys.
At a corner of the globe the sea counts and recounts its waves
And pretends to have more of them than there are stars in the sky.
Translated from the French by Geoffrey Gardner
EMilY GROSHOLZ
Two Passages from Colette
l.
The hill smokes with white plum trees,
each one immaterial and dappled
as a round cloud.
At half past five in the morning
under dew and horizontal ray,
the young wheat's unarguably
blue, the earth iron-red,
plum trees copper-pink.
Only for a moment;
the fey dishonest light goes out
with the first hour of day.
Everything grows in godly heat.
The least vegetable creature
hurls itself straight up.
Peonies, blood-red in the first month,
geyser so hard
that stalk and barely unpleated
petals crack, push up, suspend in air
their crust of earth, tipped like a broken roof
