The Last Night of the Pharmacist’s Wife

From the French.  

The wind above the glaciers that rushed here from the desert 
comes barely cooled to torment the tall pine tree's branches. 
When everything is in labor, how can you sleep, how 
can you die? 

On the slow smooth waters, the flat boats, 
the black boats are, like the soul, 
almost permanently moored. 

The year grows long before it brings back 
the distracted daughter, the son loved from afar. 
The children who laughed in her arms, on her breasts, 
rarely write to the pharmacist's wife 
even to ask for remedies. 

Beauty is cheap, except 
as a last appeal that will no longer be heard. O captive 
between the seasons, the barrel of fresh cabbages 
cut in the cellar in October's first frosts, 
when with the swallows all at once departed, you 
wake in the first silence of late fall. 

Odile, the plain is merciless. At night 
frogs at a loss to reproduce complain. 
The stork plunges its long lecherous beak down other chimneys. 

The clock with heavy wooden shoes, the heart with its heavy steps 
measure the night that barely drifts. How hard it is 
to break loose from the moorings! How long it takes 
for the water's traction to tear loose 
the chain that for so long grasped the riverbank! 

The heart in its heavy clogs paces the nocturnal prairies, 
stands shifting its feet on the shore of the water, 
which very soon it must cross.