Exercise for the Evening

Jean-Paul de Dadelsen

Stop. Instead of panting and gasping（喘气） from second to second

 Like a torrent hurtling from rock to rock with no special merit,

 Breathe

 More slowly, without moving, ankles crossed, hands clasped,

 Observe, as if it were the whole world at once,

 An object, slight and domestic, for example

 This cup.

Ignore its curve, its undulating surface, this blue pattern.

 Only consider the interior, this white cavity, this surface's

 Smoothness.

 Water is only smooth like this on evenings of exceptional calm

 After a day that gathers and holds back its joy

 At the center of the silence where its breath

 Stops.

Can you cite a day, an hour, with no echo of yesterday,

 No haste for tomorrow, when your soul was as

 Smooth as this?

Don't listen to your heart, don't measure your pulse, don't envision（想象）

 Time moving through you toward death, only

 While holding your breath look at this pure and only quality

 Of smoothness.

If you learned now to fix your gaze, your thought,

 Your soul without blinking on a few square centimeters of

 Smoothness,

 Perhaps, without leaving the world or the company of women,

 With no change in your health, your country, your diet,

 You might aspire one day to begin to understand

 The whole world.

It's a cup of no value, bought at a dry-goods-and-grocery shop

 In a Savoyard village near Boëge and Séchemouille.

 It isn't smooth.

 A microscope would reveal Himalayas of cracks.

 What makes it smooth is the light, is your ingenuous fingers.

 To a different gaze, perhaps, a cup is worth

 A head.

As much as the solemn organ or the electronic machine,

 As much as the equatorial（赤道的） storm or the Pacific tides,

 This cup

 Honors the Holy Name. If you were exiled tomorrow, you would not

 Need, provided that you had looked at it long enough, provided

 You were able to reconstruct this smoothness in your heart, to bring

 This shard along.

Here is the entrance, not to wisdom, nor to silence,

 Nor to perfect control of yourself and your shadow,

 But to a first

 Cavity smooth enough to hold a handful of peace.

 Now you can sleep, your feet together so as not to cut

 The current, hands clasped, now you can

 Rise.

Slowly, calmly, a little higher than your body, recumbent

 And loosed, as if you inhabited only your head

 Or your nostrils（鼻孔）

 Or the immediate vicinity of the pineal gland;

 Now, above your pacified body, above

 Your box of balderdash（胡言乱语）, in the smooth fluid of your outstretched body, you can

 Keep watch.