Patricia Claxton
traduction du poème de Patrice Desbiens.)

I remember a station wagon slicing the night
opening the northern night the way a hunting knife
opens its prey
We're all here
my mother my sister her husband and her kids all
in this car
Johnny B. Good's the driver his face dimly
lit by the dashboard light
I'm the only passenger not asleep while
we drive on with an ocean of bruised greenery on
either side
My sister's sleeping on the front seat
darkness blowing in and out of her open mouth
The night is long and seamless
The night is long and seamless
The night is long and seamless
The night is long and seam Suddenly
something tears the fabric something moves
out there and
now the windshield's a cinemascope screen searchlights
from Twentieth Century Fox and Gulf Western find
the animal the animal the moose in the middle of the road
paralyzed
staring at its doom approaching at 60 miles an hour
Its eyes its eyes its eyes oh God the look in them till
the last instant and the thud of steel against flesh
And my sister waking with a shriek that's
wild and
final as if the moose's soul had passed
into her
at death and then
silence
the silence of our silence in
the silence between
Timmins and Toronto.

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