Carolyn Marie Souaid
traduction du poème de Patrice Desbiens.)

I remember a station wagon slitting the night
slashing the polar night the way a hunting knife
opens its prey
We're all there, my mother, my sister, her husband, and her brood,
all aboard, it's
Johnnie B. Good LeBlanc at the wheel his face dimly lit
by the glow of the dash
Me, the only passenger unable to sleep,
the wounded green woods staggering by
on either side of the windows
Up front, Sister snoozes
the darkness entering and fleeing her open mouth
Night drags on without a wrinkle
Night drags on without a wrinkle
Night drags on without a wrinkle
Night drags on without a Suddenly
something rips through the cloth hush, something moving
the windshield rippling into a movie screen the headlights
of Twentieth Century Fox and Gulf Western beaming
straight for an animal the animal the moose freeze-framed
in the middle of the road, inert,
his future rolling fatefully toward him at sixty miles an hour
His eyes his eyes his eyes, O God, that look
right up to the last moment, and the deaf-and-dumb shock of flash
on flesh
My sister bolting awake with an ultimate,
lunatic shriek as though the moose's spirit had leapt
into her body
before dying, and finally, at long last
silence
and the silence of our silence between
Timmins and Toronto.

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