The surprise
I walk with a steady, confident step. I make the journey in thirty-six minutes, well counted. Autumn is still mild, the sun almost always shines. I walk in a straight line, go up Lajeunesse, fork on De Castelnau to go to Saint-Laurent, then Saint-Urbain.
This daily walk to the office is a great help. I have time to think about it when I do my calves again, don’t really look around. I could take one of the many straight streets parallel to the one I am taking. I tried them out and finally fell back on an ordinary course.
I often, or already, have my mind at the office. I’m thinking about how I could do this, how I could bring this. Anyway, I’m not poetic for two cents. My step is for me, though. I walk, I walk, I walk, I walk, I regain consciousness when I get to the intersections, I burn the steps without wanting to turn anything off. I don’t want to be a poet and then immediately blame myself for not being one. I don’t want to, I feel bad. I do, so I can as I wrote a few days ago. I form a mechanically well-oiled grammar.
And nothing does about it. It is enough for me to look up, to observe this quiet luminosity of the season of the dead, for a great sigh to come out in the void of my concerns. I suddenly stop walking, I take out my smartphone and take a picture of the moment to transmit it here now.
An ordinary street, autumn with all the most correct things, an increasingly cool morning, the same thing as yesterday, living poetry that can only be understood by forgetting to name it.
Is that how people live? In this regret of the passing of time? No matter what I do, I remain the same, my soul split, my mouth haggard, the air that I still miss and that I love, the will to face the ultimate mysteries.
So it is, and always will be, my poetry, this walk, this stride, and taking it up again after a seventeen-year hiatus, makes me realize that I have gone nowhere but here, always within myself. I walk, I walk, I walk.
What’s going on? What’s going on with us? I am still as surprised as ever to exist.
